Dr. Ana Sabau is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Latin American written and visual culture, with a special emphasis on Mexico. Her book,The Race War Paradigm: Riot and Rebellion in Mexico, studies the making of “race war” as a political paradigm and argues that appeals to the alleged threat of racial uprisings were crucial in mediating Mexico’s complicated transition from a colony of the Spanish Empire to an independent nation-state. The Race War Paradigm challenges conventional histories on the erosion of racial boundaries in Mexico by arguing that after Independence, colonial racializing practices and policies were continuously adapted by the new government in order to contain and repress popular demands—riots, rebellions, even civil wars—for freedom and democracy.
Talk Title: "Mapping the Caste War"
To register for this virtual lecture, click here: https://illinois.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEsfuCpqDIvGtz63WUCxFyJQ4i35vVaicGv
Abstract: This talk examines competing spatial figurations of Yucatán’s Peninsula during the years of the Caste War (1847-1901). While maps aiming to promote economic development in the region presented rebel areas as completely vacant—as deserted zones that were ready for appropriation, military maps, instead, carefully charted the presence of indigenous towns, explicitly connecting the production of geographic knowledge with the state’s (in)capacity to suppress the rebellion. In addition to discussing the tensions between economic and military spatialities, this talk offers readings of Maya rebel documents and of the visions of space and land they articulated. Caste War Maya letters provide unique theorizations about equality as connected to the unrestricted use of land for all and as such can be seen as tied to a long history of practices of interrupting statist and entrepreneurial chartings of indigenous lands.
