Emilio KourÍ

Biography

Emilio Kourí's main scholarly interest is in the social and economic history of rural Mexico since Independence. He is the author of A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico. It tells the story of the strife-ridden transformation of rural social relations in the Totonac region of Papantla during the course of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how the progressive development of a campesino-based international vanilla economy changed and ultimately undermined local forms of communal landholding. A Pueblo Divided received the 2005 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and the 2005 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize (Honorable Mention) from the American Society for Ethnohistory. His current research project is an interdisciplinary study of the idea of the "Indian pueblo" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican thought, law, and political discourse. Using modern Mexico as a case study, this book examines the origins and evolution of two deeply entrenched ideas about the character of indigenous communal organization: harmony and cohesion as defining features of Indian village social relations and communal land tenure as the natural expression of this inherent cultural solidarity. Where did these unsubstantiated ideas about Indian culture and sociability come from? How and why did they become so influential? Part one, an intellectual history, traces the philosophical assumptions underpinning the analysis of "native communities" in early sociology and anthropology. Part two, an archival-based sociopolitical history, describes how these conceptions shaped twentieth-century Mexican social thought, agrarian reform, and Indian policy. He is also writing two books: one on the making of the ejido, Mexico's sui generis postrevolutionary land-reform institution, and another one on the fate of agrarian Zapatismo in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He teaches seminars on land reforms, rural social movements, and the history of agrarian thought, as well as courses on Latin American and Latino history, and is director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies. 

Research Interest

Modern Mexico; social and economic history of Latin America; agrarian studies; the history of ideas; Cuba and the Spanish Caribbean; US Latino history