PROBLEMATIC
The Bowman Expeditions Program resolves two fundamental problems facing the development of GIS databases on different countries around the globe today:
1) Disaggregated data on the world’s peoples and places are not in accurate and meaningful formats with geolocational precision for matching place with ethnicity, populations, resources, loyalties, etc.
2) Foreign digital geographies or “human terrains” demand accurate, on-the-ground field knowledge of the “cultural terrain.”
AGS Bowman Prototype México Indígena is building a multi-scale GIS database focusing on indigenous lands of Mexico. This is an extremely important focus for the project, because indigenous territories in Mexico:
- House significant resource areas of forests, minerals, hydroelectric dams, and fresh water resources.
- Hold significant cultural heritage and attract ecotourism and development dollars.
- Where rebellions are fomented, drugs are produced, resource pirates traffic, and poverty encourages out-migration.
- Where neoliberal land reforms convert “social” to “private” property, influencing greatly all the above.
The Prototype Expedition to Mexico, led by a team of Latin Americanist geographers, is focusing on the gargantuan neoliberal land reform program, called PROCEDE, that is the most widespread and significant land reform in Mexico’s history. In just a decade, this “quiet revolution” certified 92% of the ejidos and agricultural communities in the country, changing social into private property, causing what México Indígena researchers believe will cause widespread disposition of peasant and indigenous lands with related environmental destruction of water and forest resources.
OBJECTIVES
The AGS Bowman Expedition Prototype, México Indígena, has two basic objectives:
1. Develop the First AGS Bowman Expedition and Global GIS Place-based Field Research Prototype for obtaining, interpreting, and presenting open source geographic information on a country.
The México Indígena prototype studies indigenous land tenure and natural resource conservation using three related approaches:
- Participatory research mapping.
- Traditional & archival study of Mexico’s new property regime.
- GIS on indigenous Mexico.
2. Develop a multi-scale geographical analysis or political ecology of how Mexico’s new property regime influences indigenous life, especially through the gargantuan PROCEDE land privatization program (Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares).