Planning, Violence, and Crisis in Sociohistorical Perspective: Crime, Capital, Commodities, and Cartelization in Tancítaro, Michoacán

Abstract

Social life in Mexico’s state of Michoacán is consumed by a crisis of violence. Foregrounding critical planning, this paper presents a grounded local history of the municipality of Tancítaro, Michoacán, which has the largest concentration of avocado production globally, and analyzes violence there in light of the production of space, uneven development, and the spatial politics of land. This quantitative and archival research, coupled with theoretical explanations on violence, suggests that considerations of crises and planning require situated analyses with ethnographic methods and embedded fieldwork that cross geographic scales and disciplinary boundaries as they foreground perspectives of affected community residents.