← New Books Network
New Books Network
Samuel Holley-Kline, "In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)
00:45:52
Loading summary
Transcript27 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
- [01:08]
B
Hello and welcome to New Books Network. I'm Rachel Newman, a host on this channel. Today we'll be hearing from Sam Holly Klein about his new book, in the Shadow of El the Political Economy of Archaeology and Modern Mexico. This book was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2025 as part of its series Confluencias. Sam was most recently assistant clinical professor in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park. Sam, welcome to the.
- [01:36]
C
Thank you for having me, Rachel. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [01:39]
B
So please tell us what brought you to El Tajin and how you came to write this book.
- [01:46]
C
Yeah, the project actually has its roots in my undergrad education. So in 2011, I was a student at DePauw University in Indiana and I did a study abroad program in Mexico, the unfortunately now defunct BCA Halapa program. The director of that study abroad program, an Olmec archaeologist by the name of Rob Kruger, was very good at sort of taking us around to different archaeological sites to visit, to learn. And Tahin was one of those sites. So when he took us there, it just so happened that while we were doing the kind of the standard archaeological tour, which buildings were built by who, when, what do we know? What don't we know? We came across a person making an Offering in front of the site's sort of most emblematic structure, the pyramid of the niches. It was sort of at a distance. I certainly couldn't quite tell what was going on, but it was clear he was burning some cobal. He'd left some offerings of alcohol and cigarettes. It seemed clear that this person had a very different idea of what was going on at the site than I did. And I was a tourist, a student. I was 21 at the time. I was just sort of amazed at the pyramid and wondering, oh, who built these when? What do they mean? But seeing this offering, I thought, oh, this seems interesting. I wonder what he thinks of this place and the site. So the tour was quick. But that question kind of stuck with me for the rest of my undergrad career, and it eventually formed the basis of a Fulbright proposal. I had started to read a little bit into the theory and practice of Indigenous archaeology, and there authors discussed and debated how archaeology had historically functioned as a means of disqualifying Indigenous understandings of the past and how science should be done. So I was a Spanish and an anthropology major, and so I thought, well, is there a way that these kinds of questions can be addressed ethnographically? I began to look into sort of the ethnographic research that had been conducted in Tajin and the Totonac region to that point. And it sort of struck me that there was a fair amount on the archaeology of the site. There were some studies of the contemporary Totonite communities of the region, but between them, it didn't seem like there was too much on how these communities used and understood this particular site. I thought it would be an interesting problem to study because archaeologists tended not to regard the communities that live there now as the descendants of the site's builders, whereas the people who live there now do very much think that their ancestors built the site. So I thought, well, that's an interesting disagreement. And I thought by putting together this project, I could provide a sort of platform for Totonak perspectives to sort of interact with those of archaeologists, well meaning, if perhaps a little naive. So that was the project I proposed, and I was awarded the Fulbright. And as I chronicle a little bit in the book, when I arrived to start research, the custodians, the site guards employed by the federal government to safeguard the site, had initiated a work stoppage. So trying to understand the politics of what exactly was going on when I first got there was really what led me to, well, to apply to graduate school, do the dissertation, and then get eventually to the book. But that was sort of how I. That was, you know, sort of the specific questions I was interested in addressing and how I do it, how I did it changed, of course, over the course of my grad school career and during the book process, but that was really sort of how I got to Tahin. The where and what didn't change too much.
- [05:46]
B
So in the title of your book, we have this really evocative phrase, the political economy of archaeology. And political economy and archaeology might be concepts that we wouldn't think of as going together. Could you tell us more about what you mean by this and sort of what's the big lesson that a framework like that could teach us about this region and the people around El Tajin?
- [06:11]
C
Yeah, and this was something I thought about a lot over the course of the book. And it was a framing that actually came out a little later in the writing process than you might expect. But basically, when I was sort of conducting the interviews that led to the dissertation, when I was conducting affecting the participant observation, I began to see that the kind of epistemological disconnect between archaeologists and this indigenous community that I had thought would be the focus of my interest, that really wasn't as important in the day to day of life at the site as I thought it was, or as I thought it might be. Based on the literature, I thought there would be these interpretive disagreements and that those would be important as to how people interacted with the site day to day. But after spending time at the site, I lived in Tajin, I think, for a total of about 28 months over the course of the research, I found that there were actually a whole different set of concerns that my interlocutors encouraged me to look at. And it's a broad set of concerns that I sort of gloss as the political economy of archaeology. And what that means is really two things. So first, on the one hand, what I try to do is study archaeology in relation to broader regional patterns of production, exchange and distribution. So in some sense, these are the kinds of classic themes you'd get in 20th century regional histories, like what were the important commodities, what industries rose and fell, how did people make a living? And so what I try and do, especially in the first half of the book, is to try and look at those things in relation to the development of the archaeological site. And so following the leads of my interlocutors, that leads to some kinds of unexpected connections. Like what does the development of the oil industry have to do with the construction of an archaeological site? What do changes in land tenders have to do with the development of site boundaries over time. So those were the kinds of questions that I hope to address with this framework. But on the other hand, conducting interviews, participant observation and archival research with the people employed to do the work of excavation, safeguarding and researching the site, I think also gives us an idea of archaeology as political economy, in the sense of archaeology being a means of resource redistribution, one that we can study in the same ways and with the same kinds of methods that we might use to study the growth and decline of industries, changes in land tenure, or other common topics that we might get with regional histories. And so basically, how does archeology look as a way of making a living? And how does that vary among different groups of people? And so the idea is to the broader idea. And one of the things I hope people take from this book is that archaeological sites have recent histories, people use them in different ways and the effects have varied based on who's using the site and how. Right. There are ways that archaeology has benefited certain people, has disadvantaged others. And hopefully, by studying archaeology in this way, we can get kind of a finer grained sense of how that works on the ground and perhaps optimistically, how it might be done differently in the future.
- [09:30]
B
So any survey of modern Latin American history is going to touch upon the topic of land, how property rights work, how changing property laws reflect and shape economy and society. I find when I'm teaching it, it can seem a bit abstract. But in your first chapter, you make these questions so real and local. Can you tell us about how land ownership was entangled with archaeology around Altakin?
- [09:56]
C
Yeah, this is a. And I agree this was an abstract topic that took me a while to try and get into in concrete terms. Fortunately, I have the benefit of working in a region where processes of land tenure have been well studied. I'm indebted to the work of Raymond Craig Emilio Cordill, especially for understanding late 19th century changes in land tenure, the development of private property. And one of the things that I found with relation to archaeology is that these. So on the one hand, these changes in land tenure, at first glance it might seem not like they don't have a whole lot to do with the excavation and reconstruction of an archaeological site. But there's some archival evidence to suggest, for instance, that actually the first site boundaries came about as a result of the changes in land tenure, late 19th century disentailment that led to the development of private property. So in this case, at the same time, we have the development of private property in the Region and all the conflicts that came about with that. We also have the first efforts to define this particular area as an archaeological site. Not just an isolated pyramid, not just kind of an antiquarian curiosity, but like an actual site, a building with a set of boundaries. Of course, once you start, one of the ways I try and make this concrete in the chapter is to focus on the kind of materiality, so to speak, of these boundaries, right? So it's kind of interesting because, as you might expect, when these boundaries were first mapped in the late 19th century, it was really just the pyramid of the niches. There was really sort of just this one building. And so the boundary resulting was only about a hectare, right? But as excavations sort of proceeded and developed over the course of 20th century, archaeologists and landowners began to realize that the site was bigger than they had realized, and in fact, that the archaeological site, the structures were actually on private property. And one of the complexities that emerges, especially in questions of archeology in Mexico and here I'm also indebted to the work of Lisa Breglia is that really for the period in question, the monuments themselves, the archaeological structures, the material culture, those are legally public property administered by the state. The lands on which they sit are not necessarily right. Those can be owned privately, those can be owned corporately, as in the case of ajidos. Those can be owned by state governments, by municipal governments. And so things can get really complicated really quickly. So one of the processes I tried to trace in that chapter is sort of looking in this very sort of specific region. How do these boundaries develop over the course of time? And I find especially that these boundaries have a lot to do with the maintenance and consolidation of private property. Right. So even though there are these legal ambiguities, we find both archaeologists and landowners sort of thinking in terms of private property and making claims to the site and the lands based on these ideas of property. That's kind of interesting, I think. Right. And so instead of making arguments for the. Or instead of advocating, for instance, for full scale expropriation of the site, or instead of advocating for that the site be returned completely to the communities, for instance, we have both sort of, in tracing these conflicts, we find that both sort of the communities and the archaeologists, they agree on the legitimacy of private property. And the disagreement is phrased in terms of land use, right. Is it okay to grow corn on structures, on archaeological structures, for instance, if they're not being excavated? And of course, one of the challenges, then that results for the communities is that eventually that kind of recognition depends on really the state's acceptance. Right. So when the state tends to take a heavier hand, as it did in the 1980s and 1990s, the people who had previously lived on some of the parcels found themselves the target of some very aggressive campaigns asking them to try and give up their lands in service of the archeological site. But really, over the course of that chapter, I try and focus really specifically on the materiality of borders, how they connect to questions of private property, and sort of how these debates came about and were resolved or kind of accommodated in the context of negotiations between archaeologists employed by the state and local indigenous landowners.
- [14:35]
B
So moving forward to the next chapter, in a phrase that I really liked, you suggest that we think about the oil industry and archaeology as in some sense, twins. In what way? Tell us how these two things could possibly, you know, become two parts of one story.
- [14:54]
C
Yeah, this was a surprise to me, certainly in the field, but if you think. But Papantla is actually kind of the perfect place to think about this relationship because the first wells in the region were drilled, if I'm not mistaken, in 1869 or thereabouts. So we're talking just a decade after the first oil, really the birth of the American oil industry in Pennsylvania. So it comes about. The development of the oil industry in the region comes about very early. And at the same time, there are certain parallels we can draw between drilling for oil and excavating archeological sites. Right. We're dealing with questions of the subsoil. Historically, in the Mexican case, these questions have been very complicated. Right. Historically, there have been different kinds of actors who have sought to take advantage of the subsoil in different ways. But I think what was especially interesting to me is we find these empirical connections coming about very early. Right. So when people are digging for oil, they find archaeological remains. Right. When people are digging around the archeological site, they find the potential for oil production. And in the case of Tajin, there's actually a very. The most sort of dramatic example is the fact that there was actually an oil well drilled really just like 100 meters from the site center, right from the pyramid of the niches. I mean, today it's for reasons of safety and wildlife. It's not a trek you shouldn't make necessarily, but it's really a five minute walk and you can get to the abandoned oil well that was drilled in the 1930s. And. And so what I think about in that chapter and trying to understand how these became part of the same story, well, it's because people were kind of Doing similar things with similar tools that required similar expertise. So the process of extracting oil and digging up the past, for instance, you need roads to do both of those things, right? You need roads to bring oil out, you need roads to bring people in. So it kind of makes sense that archaeologists and an oil company might cooperate on questions of road construction. Where that becomes perhaps a little unexpected is that this was happening during the 1930s, when foreign oil companies are increasingly regarded as exploitative, when it's clear that Mexico's oil wealth has not benefited the nation in the ways that perhaps the post revolutionary governments might have hoped. And archaeologists, for their part, are some of the ones charged with institutionalizing or materializing a glorious pre Hispanic past. So sort of from the top down in terms of ideologies, it would seem like foreign oil companies and nationalist archeologists have sort of very little in common. But when it comes to cases like Tahin on the ground, they actually had some, they had some common ground. And you do find in the archives some really fascinating examples of the exchange of equipment, infrastructure, expertise. And this is a relationship that develops further over the course of the 20th century. Once the oil companies pass to state control, once archaeology is sort of institutionalized in the form of the National Institute of Anthropology and history at ENA, you find collaborations continue over the course of the 20th century and I think as a result too of some of the same basic infrastructural necessities that both infrastructure share. Now of course, the other side of that story is about the effects of oil production. It was not always great for archaeology, and it has certainly caused plaintive damage to the indigenous Totonac communities of the region. So it's interesting that they should become part of the same story. But unfortunately it's also a story of environmental degradation and loss of local livelihoods as well.
- [19:01]
B
Kids, they grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small and their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on Depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download Depop to start selling. So clearly there was a lot going on beneath the soil in this micro region of Veracruz that you're studying. But there were also some things happening above ground. This is a world historic center for vanilla production, and you didn't think that this export crop story was going to be part of your research. So what were the surprises that led you to bring in vanilla to this story? I must say, when I was looking at the table of contents before I started reading, I was really surprised to see that there.
- [20:01]
C
Yeah, no, I was too. Well, if only for a few reasons. First, we have once again indebted to the work of Emilio Cordy, Ramon Ramirez Melgadejo. Others, we have Victoria Chenaut. So not only is Papantla very well known for vanilla, there's a pretty well developed historiography on the orchid and its cultivation. So I thought. I mean, well, okay, so step by step, basically, people started talking to me about vanilla, and they told me that I needed to understand something about vanilla if I was going to understand sort of why the site was the way it was today and sort of why local livelihoods looked the way they did. And that was not a relationship that I really understood. When it was first brought up to me, I thought, you know, okay, but I thought, okay, enough people told me enough times that it was important, so I will give it a try. But what I had sort of imagined I might find had to do with perhaps the kind of identitarian connections that contemporary indigenous Totonite communities have with vanilla these days. Vanilla is sort of an important cultural symbol for many of the communities of the region. And increasingly, as the Mexican vanilla industry kind of gains its footing again, it's also an increasingly important source of income for folks these days. So I thought, well, you know, maybe I'll find some of those connections in the archives and in the interviews. And what I instead found, what I instead heard, were lots of stories of danger and violence. And that was also a bit of a surprise to me when people talked about vanilla, especially during the period I'm studying, and especially during, say, the 1940s, 1960s, vanilla was almost always brought up in the context of the threat of violence in different ways. And so I thought, well, you know, I had thought I would be looking at vanilla in terms of its economic importance and in terms of some of its identitarian value to the communities of the region. But people were really. They talked a lot about the risk that cultivating vanilla could bring and some of the exploitative relationships that underlied the development of the vanilla industry. So starting in the late 19th century, I started to trace some of the patterns that previous scholarship had outlined. And in dialogue with some of the archival materials, especially the materials generated by the anthropologist Isabel Kelly during her research in the region in 1947 and 1948, I sought to understand sort of, okay, so why is vanilla so associated with violence? Why do people always talk about the danger when they talk about vanilla? And so, in the context of that chapter, I link that to basically some of the very specific the ways that vanilla is first cultivated and then cured. So vanilla has to be first grown, harvested, and then cured, typically before it's processed into extract or used for food or that sort of thing. But the relationship between cultivating and curing was one that was first racialized in a process that Emilio Cordia and others have outlined, but one that was also, over the course of the 20th century, especially, acquired some very exploitative dimensions in the sense that by means of contracts and intermediaries, basically the ones who tended to profit were the curers, who tended to be Euro descendants or mestizos. And the losses, and especially the risk of theft, of piracy, of violence, were really passed down to the largely indigenous Totonac cultivators. So then I sought to figure out, okay, what does this have to do with the archeological site? And the connections there I found are a little more diffuse, perhaps, than those we find for the oil industry. But certainly the violence wrought by the way the vanilla industry was configured in Iranpapandla was a concern for site authorities during the 1950s and 1960s. And also the wealth that vanilla brought to the region was also one that sustained different kinds of local elites interests in Tajin. So, for instance, it's kind of an interesting fact that the first federally appointed guard in Tajin is Agapito Fontesija y Vidal, who's an important figure in Emilio Cordi's book. And then who was one of the most important vanilla cultivators of the 19th century. He was also El Tahin's first sight guard. So you start to find connections like that that made me sort of think, oh, okay, I didn't quite get it, but I think people were right to lead me in that direction.
- [25:02]
B
So the presence of El Tajin and then different state institutions involved in managing it, creates some employment options in this particular region for members of Totonac communities and others. So we'll be hearing more about these sort of government jobs, and you look at that in later chapters. But could you set up for us first a little bit what the local economy is like, what kinds of livelihoods are possible in this region before we get to talking about employees of ina?
- [25:37]
C
Yeah, and this, I think, is a really important question, because if we look at it from the perspectives of archaeologists, Typically, when archaeologists study archaeological labor, one of the things we're interested in is knowledge production. Right? So how have these people who have historically been left out of publications, how do they really contribute to the way that archaeology is done, understood, and publicized? But if we start from the question you suggest, I think we get a very different view of archaeology. So, for instance, in the case of Tajin, really through the 1940s, we're talking about a community basically of rural landowners who were largely, but not exclusively, dedicated to subsistence agriculture, who cultivated vanilla, of course, and sugarcane, too, as cash crops, unlike other communities. And in Mexico, the sort of the site. The communities around El Tajin were never ejidos. Right. The private property provided a means for them to sort of sustain their livelihoods through the middle of the 20th century. And that picture starts to change in the 1950s, on the 1960s, with the development of new transportation infrastructure. You get cattle ranchers coming in from Mexico City, and you get the decline, really, of subsistence agriculture as a local livelih. And so that's sort of the broader regional and temporal context for how archaeology then starts to develop as a means of employment.
- [27:13]
B
So you've mentioned before, archaeologists don't work alone. They haven't ever worked alone. But the folks with the credentialed sort of professional degrees, they're the ones who tend to get credit for excavations, which are actually only possible because of lots of manual labor happening from lots of people and also contributions coming from local vernacular knowledge. So at El Tajin, there's a workforce of people called custodios who have performed all kinds of different labor for the site over the past century. Can you tell us more about what kinds of work they do? What makes this an appealing, or maybe not job? And are they concerned today about getting more credit for their contributions?
- [28:02]
C
Yeah, the question of the custodios, I think, is an important one, and it's a term I leave untranslated in the book precisely because it's a little. We could translate it into English perhaps as custodian. Right. The cognate. But it's a job that, especially today, has a lot of different facets. So on the one hand, custodians are perhaps similar to park rangers, but they're also, in some ways, customer service professionals. So they're the folks who, if you go to an archaeological site in Mexico, they're typically the ones taking the tickets, patrolling the sites, responding to tourist questions, and in some cases, managing and administering the sites as well, thanks to the work of Cristina Bueno Larissa Kelly we have a pretty good picture of how this workforce developed during the late 19th century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. But what I try and do in the book is sort of try and trace these histories industries into the 20th century as well. And so basically, when we talk about custodial labor, one of the differences between the custodials and the wage laborers, the excavators, the diggers and the masons, who I talk about as well is that since really for most of this period, the custodials have been federal employees, right. And since at least the 1930s have been unionized. So these are also kind of civil service positions. And in the case of Tajhin, that kind of position has historically been an appealing one. Just because what I argue is that in the decline of subsistence agriculture, the decline of local land ownership, being a custodial basically meant meant having a stable federal job as local Zhao opportunities declined. And it also meant the possibility of the same for one's descendants. So this is also a position that. These are also positions that historically have been inherited or passed down to children. So getting a custodial job, for instance, during the 1960s was potentially gave the potential for a lifetime of work and the possibility of the same for one's children. Children. Now, that's not to say that it was everyone's preference, right. So one of the challenges with this kind of work is that, yeah, it means it is a full time job. Right. So I did meet retired custodians who perhaps had not retired, but who had left the job early because, yeah, you do have to be at the site all day, every day, according to a schedule. It's very different if you're more used to working in the fields or according to different kinds of harvest schedules. The custodian jobs were not always flexible in that way and they were also not open to all. I think the case of the custodians is where we see some of the clearest benefits and disadvantages of archaeology. Because for the folks who have custodian jobs, many of them are very well aware of the jobs benefits and they've taken advantage of them. Right. There are a few cases I discuss in the book. People who arrived to Tajin or who lived into Tajin, who had been dispossessed of their lands, who came from sort of very economically challenged backgrounds, but as a result of being employed as custodians, as custodials were able to send their kids to school, were able to buy land, were able to build their houses in ways that would have been impossible. And subsistence agriculture at the time, however, those jobs weren't open to everyone. El Tajin's federal workforce was historically small, and we're talking what, three positions through the 1940s up to maybe seven through the 1970s. So the benefits were real, but they were also not evenly distributed. Sorry, you had one more question there at the end.
- [32:24]
B
Oh, sure, yeah. I did stack those up. Are they concerned with getting more credit for their contributions today or sort of, what's the agenda? What's important to custodials? Who you spoke with during your research?
- [32:36]
C
That's a great question, because I thought they would be. As I mentioned earlier, that was one of the kind of impetus for my project. And certainly there were some custodians who were interested in talking about the excavations that they participated in, you know, some of the things they'd done. But a lot of them, you know, in conducting interviews, what they. What they talked to me about was, you know, how fortunate they were to have the job and how. How much it had helped them and their families and how it had In. In general terms, how it had provided them the means to. To live the kind of life that might otherwise have been impossible. Right. So in other words, or the way I. I think about it is rather than focusing on questions of knowledge production, that, too was sort of directing me towards the broader political economy of archaeology. Right. So rather than. The anthropologist Mary Layton has made a kind of an interesting argument to similar ends in the Bolivian case, actually. So is credit what workers want? In some cases, yes. But in other cases, it's the wage, it's the benefits, it's the possibilities of making a life in challenging circumstances that are the important thing. So that was something I wanted to highlight in the book.
- [34:00]
B
So the custodios are not the only Enoch workers at El Tajin or at other archaeological sites in Mexico. There are also another set of folks you call administrativos who have a different background, both in terms of where they come from, education they've received. In some senses, they have more authority, but they also are more precarious. Could you tell us a little bit about this sort of interesting category of administrativos and what do their experiences show us about the nature of state employment under neoliberalism?
- [34:35]
C
Yeah, and the administrativos are. Excuse me, are sort of the counterpoint in some ways to the custodios. And I had thought going in that, you know, because the administrativos here were talking about a set of Anthropologists, archaeologists and others who are contracted to administer and manage the site. Right. So disperse the federal funds that come into the site, implement long term projects, you know, direct maintenance activities, that kind of thing. So because these folks, they tend to, but are not always from outside, they tend to have undergraduate or graduate degrees, and they tend to be contracted according to specific projects, rather than having tenured positions like the custodials do. And because they're the ones who publish reports, who tend to be referenced in the historiography to some extent, I had kind of thought, getting to the side, I thought, well, yeah, these are the experts, as they're more commonly known, sort of in the broader literature on cultural heritage studies. But what became clear during the initial custodians work stoppage that sort of more or less led to this book was I was surprised at the extent to which the kinds of authority I had imagined they might have based not just on educational backgrounds, but like the responsibilities of the job in practice, the picture was really quite different. So these were the folks who were not unionized, who were in some sense at the most risk of being fired, of being run out of the site, who really struggled in some cases to try and get their work done, and who were subject to all sorts of different kinds of payroll delays, of administrative trouble, things that affected the custodials relatively less. So I thought that was kind of a. That was an interesting dynamic. But I also don't want to overstate the case too much because one of the things that these. One of the key differences between this group and the Custodios is that whereas the Custodios, as I mentioned, as a workforce at the federal level, really go back to before the revolution, the administrativos as such really come out of the 1970s and the 1980s. So for most of the 20th century, at many archaeological sites, Teotihuacan is an important exception Here. Sites tended to be run, administered, managed by custodials. The person in charge, the head custodial, was the incargado. And they were responsible for doing this kind of work. However, after the 1970s, with the growth of things like decentralizing policies, technocratic management, Mexico's international agreements with organizations like UNESCO. So there begins this effort to bring about a more technocratic, more expert driven style of management to archaeological sites. And that's really when these kinds of positions come into being. So for instance, the El Tajim gets an administrator, a trained administrator, rather than a local head guard only in the 1990s. And the side becomes sort of a full fledged subdirectorate with the offices I mentioned, really only in the 2000s. So they come about. So they've always had to work in the conditions of neoliberalism, broadly construed. So as a result, as a group, they've always been subject to this kind of precarity. But on the other hand, as a result, what I argue is that they also have a kind of flexibility that is unfortunately necessary, but it also enables an, in some cases, requires them to seek other opportunities both inside the site and out. So when administrativos are fired, as has frequently been the case in Tajin, they're able to leverage expertise, connections, et cetera, to find work elsewhere. And this also varies by individual. For some folks, that's preferable to be able to work at Tahin for a bit, to be able to work elsewhere. And for other folks, it's unfortunate because they like to continue working at Tahin, but sort of the precarity and opportunity were things that I found characterizing the administrativos that also kind of differentiates them from the custodials. And in some ways, as a result, I argue, they're sort of maybe better equipped to handle some of the current changes we see happening in the Mexican cultural sector more broadly.
- [39:23]
B
So your book did not focus on tourism, but I do feel sure that many readers are going to be thinking about your book the next time they visit an archeological site. So what ideas or actions or maybe even feelings would you most want to spark in these visitors when they go to places like El Tajim?
- [39:48]
C
Yeah, I think what I would encourage people to think about, and certainly after doing this research, it's what I think about every time I visit an archeological site in Mexico or elsewhere, is to think about the. The buildings, the landscapes, all the reasons you go to an archaeological site. Think about those as the product not just of ancient indigenous peoples, in the case of Mexico, but also more contemporary forms of labor and expertise. And these are questions that can be asked not just, oh, who built those pyramids? Or when were they built, but who reconstructed them and why? Who was employed at the time and. And did they earn well? Was that a good job to have? Even when I'm not doing research, these are the kinds of questions I always enjoy sort of asking site custodians or custodials and sites across Mexico, like, oh, yeah, who was the first Custodio at this site? How did they get there? What did they do? Why should we? Who's responsible for picking up the trash? How did portable. How did water get to the side? How did electricity get to the side? Right. It's the kind of infrastructure that in some cases is kind of invisible to us as tourists. But certainly after doing the research for this book, when I go to sites, I'm always curious to look at those kinds of things, and I would encourage other people to do so as well because it's interesting and it gives these kind of places of really different kind of relevance when you think about their importance in the present. Not just as sort of cultural symbols, places with spiritual significance, although many are. There are also places where people have, for better or for worse, been able to make a living. And I find that endlessly fascinating. I hope others do, too.
- [41:40]
B
This has been a really enjoyable conversation about such a rich book. Before we let you go, what is the research you're working on these days?
- [41:49]
C
Oh, yeah. Well, speaking of endlessly fascinating. Well, so when I was doing the research, especially on the custodials, so I've highlighted, I think, some of the ethnographic methods I used in this book. But one of the big repositories where I did research is a collection of archives held by the INA that deals with federal personnel records. So some of the best sources I had on the early custodials and some of the most interesting sources for contemporary custodials, and that these were sources that I were able to bring back to custodios and kind of share were these federal personnel files. For this book, I was really curious about the custodials of El Tajin and how these sources could inform our understanding of regional history. But even while doing the research, I was always curious, like, man, what else is up? What other files are there? So that was sort of the initial pitch for the project I'm currently working on, whose sort of idea was a labor history of Mexican archaeology. So looking at these personnel files, looking at some of the kinds of sources I looked at for this book, but for other sites, I wondered about what kinds of other stories might be out there about sort of archaeology as labor in Mexico. One of the things I'm currently finding, though, is while conducting research in US Repositories to see, like, oh, you know, how did foreign archaeologists or scholars negotiate with archaeological site guards? I'm increasingly finding that some of the best documented projects, especially in Yucatan and even Guatemala, were not always staffed by indigenous folks. In some cases they were Afro descendants. In some cases they were West Indian migrant laborers. Finding some of these broader transnational connections has really caused me to question some of the assumptions of my initial framing of the project. So the project I'm currently working on is now tentatively titled the Work of Mesoamerican Science, Politics and labor in 20th century middle America. And actually the first product of that research on how the the United Troop Company, of all things, played a role in the employment of archaeological workers in Guatemala is just out in Comparative Studies in Society and History, open access, if you're interested.
- [44:09]
B
Wow. Well, that's great. I'm about to go download it this very moment. We've been speaking today with Sam Holly Klein about his book in the Shadow of El the Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico. Sam, thanks so much for speaking with new Books in Latin American Studies.
- [44:26]
C
Thank you, Rachel. It's been a pleasure.