Rearview mirrors: Harvard Land Rover interviews and the ethnographic drive in midcentury Chiapas

Abstract

In 1951, Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial-cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. State investment in the transportation infrastructure of indigenous Chiapas enabled the geographical mobility of scores of U.S. anthropologists and students who used these roads to access “closed corporate communities” such as Zinacantán during the late-1950s and 1960s. Working from archived correspondence and field notes, this essay examines Harvard Chiapas Project founder Evon Vogt's early project interviews conducted on these roads in a Land Rover. Reading the Land Rover as a space-making technology of ethnographic rapport, I ask how such vehicles have structured ethnographic forms of intimacy and attachment and whether they render the interview space a site of capitalist capture. I ultimately refract a surfaced critique of the interview form's capitalist coloniality through a weak-theoretical evocation of the Land Rover's social, technological, and symbolic indeterminacy.