DOI: 10.18738/t8/w7r3he
title: Communities in Michoacán, Mexico that were presented Hijuelas during the Privatization of Indigenous Land, 1719‐1929

description: Map of the 228 communities in Michoacán, México that participated in the 19th century liberal privatization of indigenous land known as the reparto de tierras (1868-1929.) The communities are organized by their late 19th century political divisions and possess other attribute data such as the category of settlement, population circa 1880, tenencia status, alternate names, languages spoken and reference numbers for the UT metadata and the British Library’s digital collection of deed books. The communities in this map were found in michoacano deed books, digitized as a part of the British Library’s “Conserving Indigenous Memories of Land Privatisation in Mexico: Michoacán’s Libros de Hijuelas, 1719-1929 (EAP931)” through the Endangered Archives Project in collaboration with LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. The map connects--via reference numbers--the metadata hosted by UT (LADI) and the actual digitized volumes held by the British Library to the relevant community. This allows for the hijuelas collection to be explored spatially. The map also contains the result of primary research in 19th century sources: the political divisions, categories of settlement (ciudad, villa, pueblo, hacienda, etc), population data, languages spoken, and alternate names and spellings for each of the 228 communities mapped.
description: Names of the 228 localities have been taken from a list collated by Rocío Verduzco Sandoval, the leader of the hijuelas digitization team and a student of the Universidad Michoacana San Nicolás Hidalgo (UMSNH). The location data, in decimal coordinates, was taken from 2020 INEGI map data via Google Maps, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency GEOnet Names Server (GNS), INEGI’s 2005 and 2010 Mexican census data, and the 1992 Gazetteer of Mexico by the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency. In rare cases where no location data could be found in the above sources, a georeferenced 19th century map of Mexico from the Mapoteca Orozco y Berra was used in conjunction with Google satellite imagery to pinpoint the likely location of small communities that had disappeared from modern maps. The “longitude” and “latitude” fields were then used to create point features on a map. 

The “district,” “municipality,” “type_of_comunity, ” and “population” fields were sourced with data from a 19th century alphabetic index of Mexican communities and a geographic dictionary from the same period. The “tenencia” field was sourced from Sandoval’s initial list and was supplemented when necessary by the 1880 geographic dictionary. The “other_names/spellings” field was sourced from the UT generated metadata for the digital libros de hijuelas collection held at the British Library through the Endangered Archives Project (EAP.) The language data was pulled from an 1864 work by Orozco y Berra entitled Geografía de las lenguas y carta etnográfica de México: precedidas de un ensayo de clasificación de las mismas lenguas y de apuntes para las inmigraciones de las tribus and Cubas’ 1888 Diccionario. The reference numbers in the last two fields come from item level descriptions of the hijuelas volumes on the EAP project site, or from UT hijuelas metadata when a community was not mentioned in any item deception.