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Actriz Principal de El Despojo, Rulfo, 1959

About

    Literature holds the power to convey the emotions and sentiments of the authors and of the time period in which it is written. Literature can be taken as a snapshot of a certain point in history. However, there are limitation to what literature can convey. There seems to be a disconnect between humanities and the digital and quantitative fields in as much as literature tends to be represented as a subjective medium in which those that participate in literary production are presenting their own unique voices that don't quite reflect or speak for the reality of the subjects of their literary work. The digital and quantitative field on the other hand tends to be given an objective position in which the information presented is accepted as verifiable and true. However, as so-called digital humanists we are attempting to unite mediums that are often seen as something in opposition of each other.  


    With this project, I will attempt to provide an interdisciplinary medium to present aspects of demographic changes presented in the literary works of Juan Rulfo, Agustín Yáñez, and Jesús Goytortúa. A common theme within the literary work of these authors is a sense of loneliness and emptiness in the environment of the novels. This is especially evident in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas but is also evident in Jesús Goytortúa’s Pensativa and Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua and Las vueltas de tiempo. In Rulfo’s work we see references to an empty landscape and demographic change that has impacted the traditional ways of life that the characters in his novel had had. Key to understanding the time period in Rulfo’s work is the Cristero War (1926-1929) and post-revolutionary Mexican society. Rulfo presents a deep feeling of loss due to the upheaval in rural Western Mexico caused by the years of armed conflict that decimated the region. However, the actual demographic changes in the region have never been looked at in reference to work of theses authors.   

  
 

       Breakdown

    For the purpose of this project and due to the limited time, I will only be looking at references of population change/society change in rural Jalisco in the literary work of Juan Rulfo. I have taken the novel Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas as the base to a larger project I will be carrying out in the future and taken out quotes and sections in which the author directly and indirectly talks about the demographic changes in the region. For my primary data source used, I used the Mexican census of 1930. This was the largest and most extensive census record ever conducted in Mexican history up to that point. The government scoured every inch of the country and recorded every village, town, and city in the country. Another important reason I chose the 1930 census was because of its timing. The census was conducted a year after the end of the Cristero War, the timing of the census would allow us to infer on some of the immediate impacts of the war. I chose to focus on the state of Jalisco for this initial project because the census record obtained from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) maintains a digitized copy of the facsimile records of population breakdown of the state of Jalisco. I transcribed to digital copy into an Excel CSV file in order to create the digital visualizations. For this project, I looked at two key elements- that type of settlement and the status of the settlement. 
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Flourish Jalisco Settlements

Settlement Type

Settlement are categorized as follows: campamento, congregación, mina, mineral, estación ferrocarril, hacienda, ranchería, rancho, pueblo, villa, ciudad. I chose to keep the naming conventions used in the original document because the settlement type identified in the census record do not translate in English. Below, I provide a key terms list with approximate translations and descriptions of the settlement nomenclatures. There were a total of 1846 settlements identified in the dataset, the 2 largest settlement types were rancho and hacienda. Why is the settlement type important? The settlements impacted by the demographic changes present a picture of people moving or being forced to move due to varying circumstances of which the scope of this project will not fully dive until a future date. It presents the question of whether the demographic shift primarily impacted rural regions, periphery regions? Was an hacienda more likely to survive the shift and what is it that makes the municipalities that lost the most settlements according to 1930 different from their counterparts? The other important aspect of the dataset that I take into account in coordination with settlement type, is settlement status- is it habitado or deshabitado? A unique feature of the 1930 census is that the federal government recorded every settlement regardless of whether it was still inhabited- this aspect indicates that sometime between the incomplete 1920 census and the 1930 census, these settlements still had populations. The maps to follow have settlement points in order to identify where populations clustered. 

Limitations

The project and data do present some limitations. The census materials for the state of Jalisco are incomplete and I am unable to obtain access online. The tome used for the project is book 2 of an unknown number of tomes that contain the information needed to conduct a complete comprehensive construction of the data in map from. I contacted the Jalisco State Government but received no reply, as such, I believe that in order to further develop the project I would need to go to the state archives in Jalisco. It is possible that only one of the facsimiles has been digitized as such I would need to digitize the rest or find the appropriate person in charge of state archives that could answer my request. As such, the project only maps the municipalities that were available in the found document. While it is not a complete picture, it does provide a valuable reference point for the connection between the literature and demographic proof. Furthermore, for the project I did not include actual population numbers as it did not seem relevant for this phase of the project. This decision was taken also for practical reasons, population numbers would have to be compared to the 1920 census or the 1910 census which are both incomplete due to the conflict during the Mexican Revolution. Furthermore, state specific information in the way of the facsimile obtained are unavailable online, as such, I would need to access the information either directly from the source or contact the appropriate person in the state archives. Methodologically, I would like to include population numbers in order to have another point of reference. Additionally, creating points on the map presented a major challenge principally because of geolocators inability to geolocate the settlements. While some were found through geolocators, the vast majority of the settlements in the CSV failed to be located in conventional geolocators. This could be due to a couple reason, first because of the nature of the remote and tiny settlements and second because of the continual demographic change in the latter half of the 20th century the further emptied rural Jalisco, rendering many settlements extinct. To solve this, I painstakingly scoured my dataset and individually searched for the geolocation of the points I could find.

Key Terms

  • Campamento
    Translates to encampment, generally is a very small settlement without services (running water) usually in remote locations- is ideal for the extraction of natural resources.
  • Congregación
    A small village build around a religious institution, usually a church. 
  • Mina
    Small settlement surrounding a traditional mine.
  • Mineral 
    Small settlement surrounding a mineral extraction site.
  • Estación Ferrocarril 
    Settlement that around around train station stops that were build during during President Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship 1876-1911.
  • Hacienda                                                                                                                                  Major economic settlements that are a kin to the plantation system in the American South. They were first introduced into Nueva España during the Spanish colonial area as a method to economic development. They generally own a lot of land and settlements within the hacienda sphere of influence devote their labor to the hacienda. These settlements expanded exponentially during the Diaz dictatorship and their destruction was an important goal of the Mexican Revolution. 
  • Ranchería                                                                                                                                   Very small village with very basic services, generally composed by 2-10 families.
  • Rancho                                                                                                                                           A village, larger than a ranchería but smaller than a pueblo. Has basic services and is generally devoted to agricultural production. This is the main settlement unit for rural inhabitants, could be remote and not connected to regional infrastructure.
  • Pueblo A small town that may number a few hundred to a couple thousand inhabitants. Has a more varied economic development than a rancho and is generally connected with the regional infrastructure. 
  • Villa                                                                                                                                       Traditional Spanish title for city, this title is only be used if it was granted by the Spanish Crown during the colonial era. 
  • Ciudad                                                                                                                                         City title granted post-colonial era. 

This project does not pretend to present an all-encompassing narrative of the demographic changes in Mexico and, more specifically, Jalisco but rather provide another source of information that could explain the sentiments expressed in the authors novels. This project is meant to be developed further in the future to be incorporated into my dissertation. 

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