During the colonial period, these lands that we now call Guanajuato were the granary of Mexico. A broad, sunny valley on the northern edge of Mesoamerica inhabited by nomads who wandered through it in sync with the seasons. These nomads were commonly known as Chichimecas, but also included the Pame, Guamar, Zacateco, and the Guachihil nations. The armed foreigners who came to our lands saw enormous potential to produce food in those extensive valleys bathed by rivers and stormy rains. These rivers that we now call Guanajuato, Silao, and Lerma. In order to turn this promising territory into the granary that would feed their colonizing army and the exploiters of the gold and silver mines of Guanajuato and Zacatecas, laborers had to be imported. They brought indigenous Otomi and Tarascans from their original territories, along with slaves from the Afro-descendant population, and put them to work the land. It was from here that came the corn, wheat and beans that grew the bodies of those that exploited the land. It was from here that came the sorghum that fed the pigs and cattle that would provide protein to the colonizers. It was from here that came the alfalfa that fed the horses that pulled the carts loaded with minerals. "Colonization lays the foundations for subsequent migrations," warned American historian Aviva Chomsky, 500 years later, in her books: “Undocumented. How Immigration Became Legal”; “They Take Our Jobs”; and “20 More Myths About Immigration”. Although she talks about the United States and its anti-immigrant discourse, the link she makes between the dispossession of a territory and its population can be extrapolated.

During the first half of the 20th century, Guanajuato began to experience a series of changes in its economic tradition of agriculture. The agrarian re-distribution that inflamed spirits in other parts of the country, in Guanajuato faced agribusiness men who defended private property. At that time a couple of droughts that lasted for two decades, affected small producers who depended on rainfed agriculture with no government support. Around the same time, in 1942, the Mexican and North American governments promoted the Bracero Program. Through this program hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers –mainly from Guanajuato, Jalisco and Michoacán– crossed the northern border to compensate for the shortage of labor in the USA. Guanajuatan peasants left their depleted plots and instead went to harvest Californian crops. They also participated in the construction of large infrastructures of the thriving nation, such as the Chicago railroad. This, according to the "Report on the number of migrants who participated in the Bracero Program," elaborated by the state government in 2005.

Since then, given the abandonment of the Mexican fields, the rates of migration with and without documents from Guanajuato skyrocketed and the fields were emptied of small producers. Those empty fields were bought by agribusiness men, or were destined for the assembly plant industry that made its way in the 1980s and 1990s. This occurred when Mexico signed international commercial agreements, including the Free Trade Agreement. In the chapter "El atraco", from the book “Mexico Unconquered”, journalist John Gibler narrates his tour of the state of Guanajuato along with conversations he had those who remained in the countryside in the midst of that migratory process. Gibler presents us with a photograph of a paradox. A paradox of having an abandoned field due to the lack of support for family sowing while at the same time, the strengthening of the agro-industry that has all the government support for the planting of berries, hydroponic lettuce, broccoli, celery, tomatoes, and asparagus for export:

“The only ones who still have crops are the rich, the ones that have large plots and irrigation systems. For the people who are poor there is nothing left (...) Before people had cattle, and now? What cattle? There is nowhere to graze. Almost the entire field is abandoned, there is no planting, but at the same time the rich have bought everything” says Jorge, a resident of the town of Guadalupe, to Gibler. The social impact of this economic transition was brutal. The new dynamics uprooted small farmers who sought luck on the other side of the border or in the nascent assembly plant industries eager for cheap labor. This forced them to leave their homes or make them dependent on the assembly plant to survive. All of this was perceptible in the landscape. The green or golden fields, depending on the season of alfalfa, corn, sorghum or wheat, gave way to a homogeneous gray of industrial warehouses and car assembly plants. The apex of this transition came in 2006, when the state and federal governments promoted the founding of the Puerto Interior (inland port). This has turned the state into an industrial megacity and transit way for export goods.

As a consequence, the small ranches and towns of Guanajuato grew as corridors and backyards of those assembly companies. The landscape became a desolate hybrid between the agro-industrial and the industrial. The earth cracked. Where fruits and vegetables used to grow, the bodies of disappeared people  began to be harvested.