My research argues that the Mexican state built after the Revolution was designed to manage Indigenous autonomy. Historians often describe agrarian reform as a negotiation that brought rural communities into the nation. I trace a longer history, from the land privatization laws of the 1850s to the struggles that continue today, in which communities defended their land and self-government while the state worked to contain them. I follow this history in two places: the P’urhépecha communities of Zacapu, Michoacán, and Melchor Ocampo in the State of Mexico, a community organized around the anarchist tradition of Ricardo Flores Magón.

Alongside force and surveillance, the state relied on paperwork. I call this process administrative domestication: the government absorbed radical demands for land and autonomy into petitions, files, and procedures it could manage, delay, and when necessary, eliminate.

The state also fitted its methods to each place. In Zacapu, drainage, land surveys, and force enclosed the wetlands that sustained P’urhépecha communities. In Melchor Ocampo, surveillance, selective prosecution, and symbolic recognition absorbed the anarchist movement. I call this differentiated rule.

My dissertation, Rethinking the Indigenous Proletariat: Land, Autonomy, and Resistance in Rural Mexico, draws on state archives, surveillance files, anarchist newspapers, private family collections, and my own field research. By the Indigenous proletariat, I mean people who lost their land, migrated for wage work, and were divided by land law, yet kept governing themselves as communities and holding onto the memory of their territory.

My work also recovers what the state could not extinguish. These communities’ political traditions survived outside the archive and returned, transformed, in later movements and in the struggles for autonomy that continue today. They also reveal the rural and Indigenous roots of Mexican anarchism, and the women who organized within these communities.

Two University of California President’s fellowships have supported my research: the Pre-Professoriate Fellowship (2025–26) and the Dissertation-Year Fellowship (2026–27). I have also received fellowships and grants from The Humanities Institute and the Department of History at UC Santa Cruz, as well as from Global Latinidades at UC Santa Barbara.