Juan Pablo Morales Garza

Non-Resident Fellow

Research Project: The nahua community reconstituted under the ejido, 1870-1930

Research Interests: Indigenous history, local history, social history of the nahua peoples, cultural cartography, intellectual history of 19th century Mexico, environmental history

Juan Pablo Morales Garza is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation analyzes a previously ignored large corpus of about 1,500 individual land titles of several indigenous communities from the Valley of Mexico in the mid-19th century. Through the systematic analysis of land tenure, land use, property ownership and toponymy, his dissertation partially reconstructs the internal forms of community-level government, the structure of territorial units known in 19th-century Mexico as pueblos and/or barrios (wards) and the symbolic representations of place and landscape. His dissertation asks: How were indigenous communities structured, both territorially and politically? How did indigenous communities, despite threats to dissolve their corporate organization, successfully maintain a relatively autonomous government? How was land used and managed? What was the land's ritual role in these corporate organizations?

 Currently, Juan Pablo is engaged in a public history project as content director and researcher of Cuenca, a social and environmental history documentary on the basin of Mexico, funded and produced by Mexico City’s Public Broadcaster Capital 21. He is part of the editorial board of the digital magazine Sentido Común, a monthly publication analyzing Mexican politics, economy and culture. Juan Pablo earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City.