Reading Race in Rocks: Political Geology in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

This article explores the interplay of race, the underground, and geological science in nineteenth-century Mexico. The analysis focuses on visual and scientific accounts of the Cacahuamilpa Caves, a network of natural caves that became one of Mexico’s best-known natural wonders during the nineteenth century. Drawing insight from political geology, I argue that these accounts operationalise certain basic geological premises in order to naturalise racial hierarchies in a recently independent nation. In the first part I contend that Baron Gros’s visual depiction of the caves stages a stratigraphic relationship between an Indigenous substratum (possessing inert, extractable properties) and a White stratum (defined by the active, scientific extraction of underlying resources). The second part shows how the scientific accounts by Bárcena, García Cubas, and others mobilise geological knowledge with the aim of fashioning a teleological narrative in which Indigenous peoples are established as the link between past geological eras and the modern nation. Finally, the last part focuses on how these geological accounts actively exclude Indigenous understandings of the earth based on their alleged incapacity to acknowledge the geological distinction between life and nonlife.