Colonizing the Coloniser

Abstract

Haciendas, the monocrop plantation estates of the Latin Americas owned by landowners of Spanish descent, have dominated over generations of indigenous minorities of the Latin American continent. Henequen, nicknamed green-gold, a type of agave harvested in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, led to the construction of hundreds of henequen harvesting-processing haciendas in the state of Yucatán. The industry was beyond lucrative due to its inhumane and exploitative debt peonage system, which resulted in the uprising of the indigenous Mayans in the late 19th century resulting labor shortage in the region. At the beginning of the 20th century, the landowners of the haciendas imported laborers from the far eastern country on the verge of annexation to Japan; the Koreans were clueless about the working conditions of the haciendas. After the agrarian uprising that later became the Mexican Revolution and the sudden market crash of henequen in 1920s, the landowners abandoned the grand manors of the haciendas and fled. Located in the center of the town with an authoritative presence, ‘colonized and eroded by living organisms’( Cairns & Jacobs, 2014, p. 72), the hacienda of Lepán is now donated as part of the community estate. Through historical research and precedent studies, Colonizing the Colonizer envisions a hypothetical reality where the multicultural identities of Lepán are given full control over the occupation of the crumbling ruin of the ex-hacienda for the resurgence of the resurgence endemic stingless bee apiculture. This is an inquisitional journey questioning the architect’s role in the age of the Anthropocene. Testing the critical, what precisely the architect’s role may be, what the author desires it to be through the scenarios adapted to the case study of the ex-hacienda of Lepán. At first, the context may be perceived regional and even foreign to the reader. Be that as it may, this is the town where transatlantic mobility forcibly shaped the contour of the social, political, and cultural terrain, followed by the globalization that heavily affected the industry and the demographic of the region. This is a perfect miniature of what has happened to all of us. Therefore indeed, it is relatable to us, the people.