A Confounded Statistic: Turn-of-the-Century Mexican Agriculture in Incommensurable Terms

Abstract In 1899, municipal officials throughout Mexico sent tables of agricultural statistics to Mexico City to assist in the preparation of a special publication for the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, where the Mexican government hoped it would impress the world with Mexico's modernity and potential. Though the activity was nothing new, the ways in which municipal officials provided the requested information confounded the national project of both understanding and representing the Mexican countryside. The statistics were never published. This article serves as an introduction to a new dataset and collection of maps built from transcriptions of the manuscript tables. It also demonstrates that regular participation in statistical undertakings served as a means for provincial Mexicans to complicate and confound the process of state consolidation. Here I see, rather than refusal or rebellion, ready participation in state knowledge projects as another way in which those beyond Mexico City managed their relationships with President Porfirio Díaz's technocratic government. Engaging with conceptions of governmentality on one side and data management on the other, I use the 1899 agricultural statistics to highlight how unruly participation in data collection frustrated the practice's centralizing and standardizing project.