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After the Altepetl : Indigenous struggle and the colonial origins of the modern state in sixteenth century central Mexico

University of British Columbia

This thesis examines the contested character of early colonial domination in central Mexico, more specifically, the Valley of Mexico or Anahuac. Informed by critical Marxist and postcolonial state theory, critical race theories, and Nahua epistemology and historiography, I examine the traces left behind by Indigenous politicians, elders, and community leaders by looking at testaments and primordial titles to reconstruct their actions and some of their policies vis-á-vis colonial encroachment. From this perspective, I interrogate approaches to the modern state and colonialism that exclude Indigenous epistemologies and fail to consider racial formations as a crucial aspect of the modern constitution of power relations. I conclude by assessing the impact that this approach to the modern state can have in the understanding of hemispheric and global processes of state formation and the centrality of Indigenous and ‘subaltern’ geographies as embodied, relational, and productive frameworks for the decolonization of state theory.

Text

2019-11-14

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/72277

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/