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CHAPTER 3: DEVELOPMENTALISM IN NORTHERN MEXICO, 1910–1934
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CHAPTER 3 DEVELOPMENTALISM IN NORTHERN MEXICO, 1910–1934 Cotton agriculture in the borderlands gathered momentum after 1900. The expansion of the Laguna cotton region in the Porfiriato went a long way toward solving a chronic development problem in Mexico by removing the bottleneck in the national cotton fiber supply that had plagued the textile industry since independence. At the same time, however, it created another development problem. Contrary to the enduring ideal of the democratic, productive, rural smallholder society, the Laguna cotton region was characterized by large landholdings and migrant wage labor. The problems that the industrialization and modernization of agriculture was supposed to erase—poverty and social instability, for example—continued and worsened, leading to the decade-long violence of the Mexican Revolution. While there was a great deal of continuity in the practice and process of development before and after the Revolution, there were also significant changes made to confront these problems. During the period from 1910 to 1934, visions of an agrarian north were adjusted to meet the pressing social issues of land concentration and labor migration made evident by the Revolution. Norteño presidents from Madero to Calles made efforts to settle small farmers in irrigation systems: part of a larger plan to lay claim to water from the international rivers, stimulate cotton production, and make the countryside prosperous and peaceful. These were large-scale hydraulic projects, and the ideology of development that underwrote them went through changes even before the Great Depression forced a reevaluation of the dominant neoclassical economic paradigm. During and immediately after the Revolution, Mexican governments were reluctant to invest in development projects because of laissez-faire ideological commitments or lack of financial resources. The government of Francisco Madero provided the private Colorado River Land Company with incentives to irrigate and colonize the Mexicali cotton zone, in the hope that this would stem emigration to the United States and provide political stability to the region. Pres. Alvaro Obregón continued with a strategy that placed the responsibility for development on private investors, until growing U.S. presence in the borderlands, domestic political forces, and conditions presented by the world cotton economy moved him to secure for developmentalism in northern mexico 45 his government a more active role in the creation of irrigated cotton development projects. It was during the Calles presidency, however, that the state took the role of directly financing and organizing rural development in northern Mexico through the construction and colonization of irrigated agricultural zones by the newly created Comisión Nacional de Irrigación (CNI). These new irrigation zones were to be settled by rancheros who had lost their land during the Porfiriato and the Revolution and had become wage workers, sharecroppers, or migrants. Rancheros were thought to be more independent and hard working, and biologically and culturally more European than other Mexicans, which made them especially apt subjects and objects of development. The vision of “integral, regional” development held by CNI engineers and other state actors included racial and cultural as well as economic, social, and geographical elements, and during the Calles administration it guided the creation of the cotton-producing “Don Martín” irrigation system in Coahuila and Nuevo León. The goal of the postrevolutionary government irrigation projects, then, was to recreate the dynamism of irrigated cotton agriculture in areas such as the Laguna, Mexicali, and South Texas in other irrigation zones, but based on stable regional social formations characterized by racially and culturally progressive small property owners rather than large plantations with landless, temporary, and migratory workers. Development and Developmentalism What is development? Alan Knight argues that lurking deep within the political projects of Mexico’s postrevolutionary leaders was a pervasive “developmentalism”—a modern “current of ideas that stressed the need to develop Mexican society and economy, above all by disciplining, educating and moralizing the degenerate Mexican masses.”1 Knight describes developmentalism as an enduring culture of the state, reflected in the “broader socio-economic (“developmentalist”) concerns” of governments before and after the Revolution. The slipperiness of the concept of development is evident in the self-referentiality of Knight’s definitions of “developmentalism ,” and suggests the need for a more precise discussion. As Albert Hirschman has argued, the crisis of the 1930s provided an opening for “development economics” approaches other than the dominant free market ones of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These new approaches flourished during the cold war, when the desire to maintain consumer power and political stability in the “third...