‘Civilizing’ Smallholders Through Oil Palm: the Politics of Subsumption Across Southern Mexico's Commodity Frontiers

ABSTRACT While most frontier studies associate commodity expansions with dispossession, I argue that such expansions can also function as ‘civilizational’ projects aimed at overcoming traditional farming and creating new rural subjects better suited to the needs of capitalist development. Using a Gramscian approach to study subsumption, I analyse three state interventions that promoted oil palm across southern Mexico: the 1950s Papaloapan project (Veracruz) that sought to transform lowland campesinos and highland indigenous communities in the image of commercial mestizo (Spanish‐speaking) farmers to support industrialization; the 1970s Acapetahua project (Chiapas), which promoted cooperatives to modernize smallholders and achieve food self‐sufficiency during the Cold War; and, more recently, the Los Ríos intervention (Campeche), where neoliberal policies positioned employment in corporate plantations as best for landless peasants to ‘improve themselves’. This research shows how the state conceived of rural classes as obstacles to development, and aimed to reshape their farming, culture and even morality.