By Francisco Garfias and Emily Sellars This month, the Mexican government is celebrating its 200th anniversary of independence from Spain. The nation’s independence was won after a protracted conflict sparked by an event celebrated across the country every year on this date (September 15th): Miguel Hidalgo’s Cry of Dolores in 1810. Hidalgo’s uprising heralded the … Continue reading When State Building Backfires
By Francisco Garfias and Emily Sellars This year marks the 500th anniversary of the siege of Tenochtitlan, the final battle of the Aztec-Spanish War. It ended in the defeat of the Triple Alliance/Aztec Empire and the eventual establishment of Spanish colonial rule in Mexico. Few events occupy as important a place in Mexican or even … Continue reading From Conquest to Centralization
This post is about an amazing dataset that looks reliable at first glance but has some serious issues when you look closer.[1] The individual errors are small, subtle, and hard to spot. When added together, though, they can cause big problems for HPE researchers. Before I get into the details about the specific dataset—why so … Continue reading Adventures with an (Almost) Amazing Dataset
A lot of us have been eagerly following the vaccine rollout, looking forward to a time when we can travel and visit family and friends again. It striking to see how differently this process is playing out across American states. A healthy 55-year-old in Connecticut can get a vaccine right now, while one living just … Continue reading Borders and Boundaries in HPE Research
Not unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden began his presidency with a series of executive actions on immigration and border security, including halting construction of the border wall, preserving DACA protections, pausing deportations (or attempting to), ending the “Muslim ban” on travel, and ending new enrollment in the Migrant Protection Protocols policy (i.e., the “remain in … Continue reading Policy, History, and Mexico-U.S. Migration
Those who have been following the ongoing political developments over the 2020 Census in the United States (not to mention recent posts on Broadstreet) will need no reminder that the process of counting the national population is complicated and political. Beyond the consequences for apportionment and federal transfers, the official census figures that emerge from … Continue reading The Creation and Survival of Unreliable Data: Mexico’s 1921 Census
By many measures, Mexico City is in a terrible location. Wedged between volcanic mountains in a highland basin on top of a filled lakebed, the geography of the city leaves it vulnerable to earthquakes and volcanoes, as well as to cycles of flooding and drought. Once called the “most polluted city in the word,” its … Continue reading Physical Geography and Historical Political Economy
Pandemics are political, as Alexandra Cirone highlighted in an earlier post. Motivated by the numerous examples of official corruption during the COVID-19 crisis, Francisco Garfias and I decided to investigate how epidemics shaped the potential for rent extraction and the value of holding office in colonial Mexico. This required us to construct a dataset of … Continue reading Archival Silences and Historical Political Economy