Challenging Abstraction: Unruly Statistics and the State in Progress.

This article examines unpublished agricultural data collected for Mexico's pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition to argue that statistical practices reveal state making as a dynamic, multisided process involving negotiation between central authorities and local actors. It highlights how local Mexican enumerators in the late nineteenth century actively reshaped and contested official categories—especially regarding agricultural productivity—by annotating, expanding, or refusing standardized survey tables, thereby asserting alternative visions of rural life centered on subsistence alongside commercial agriculture. The study presents a methodology that treats anomalies and inconsistencies in historical statistics not as errors but as meaningful evidence of political and social dialogue within state formation. By analyzing manuscript tables from over 1,400 municipalities, the article demonstrates the complexity and regional diversity of Mexican agriculture at the turn of the century and calls for historians to engage with raw, unruly data to better understand the contested and iterative nature of governance.