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CHAPTER 5 CRISIS AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE RÍO BRAVO DELTA, 1930–1935 The crisis of the 1930s has attracted a great deal of interest from historians and social scientists. Economic historians debate the causes of the economic crash of 1929–1933 in Europe and the United States, and differ over the nature of recovery. The unique experiences of Latin American countries in this process have received close attention , and although not a representative case for Latin America during the 1930s, a number of works discuss Mexico’s economy.1 The crisis served as the catalyst for a long-term transition in the primary sector of the Mexican economy from ranching and mining to commercial agriculture, and the northern borderlands was home to this new agriculture, which was largely focused on cotton.2 While these studies recognize variation between northern Mexico and the center/south, few focus on this transition in particular regional spaces, landscapes, and societies in the 1930s, and none recognize the central importance of cotton. The history of Matamoros shows how and why the transition was made to a cotton-driven economy and society during this period of crisis. Social fields such as that constituted by cotton in the borderlands must be understood historically to avoid encountering the problems of stasis that various structuralisms got bogged down in during the 1970s. Antonio Gramsci’s dialectical notion of history is useful in understanding this temporal aspect of the social field. “A common error in historico-political analysis,” he wrote in his prison notebooks , “consists in an inability to find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural. This leads to presenting causes as immediately operative which in fact only operate indirectly, or to asserting that the immediate causes are the only effective ones.”3 To understand the history of crises, Gramsci suggested a balanced analysis not only of the various political, economic, social, and cultural actors and elements that comprise a particular social field at a particular moment, but also of the different temporal frames in which these kinds of phenomena present themselves. The way in which the lower Río Bravo/Rio Grande Valley experienced the crisis of the 1930s was determined by the organic and conjunctural histories of cotton, 92 chapter 5 class, water, and development ideology that congealed in that place at that moment, catalyzing the transition from cattle ranching to commercial agriculture. During the 1920s, cotton production became increasingly costly in the old cotton belt of the United States and relatively cheaper in the southwestern United States and in other countries, resulting in a dramatic increase in production in the latter areas. In 1929 the New York stock market crashed, exacerbating these structural tendencies in the political economy of cotton, yet Mexico’s borderlands cotton zones were dependent on U.S. capital, which hindered their ability to increase production. Although the expansion of cotton westward and southward was accentuated after 1933 with the U.S. government’s programs of cotton acreage reductions and price supports, Mexican production continued to be limited by aridity and the lack of new irrigated lands in northern Mexico. The mixture of “organic” and “conjunctural” conditions—a world market increasingly favorable to cotton production in Mexico; aridity; problems of flooding and unemployment in the delta region—shaped the social field in the Valle Bajo Río Bravo, as well as the development project the Cárdenas government mounted to address the crisis in that part of the borderlands. In the early 1930s, the decapitalization of cotton agriculture in Matamoros was accompanied by a massive return migration of Mexicans to the region, provoked by a fall in agricultural and industrial production and deportation campaigns in the United States. This unemployed, unsettled population encountered extreme hardships as a result of a series of floods that struck the Mexican side of the delta region of the Río Bravo/Rio Grande during those years. Directing his actions toward the sharecroppers, renters , and rural workers generated by the incipient transition to cotton agriculture during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and toward the thousands of Mexicans repatriated during the Depression, Cárdenas backed agrarian reforms and the establishment of ejidos and colonias agrícolas in the region. The president expanded his support base in the region by allying with the portesgilista political leaders who had been displaced from municipal power a few years earlier. By supporting both campesinos and elements of the cotton elite, he laid the foundations for...

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