La Comarca: De la Revolución a la expropiación de las haciendas, 1910-1940 by María Vargas-Lobsinger (review)

María Vargas-Lobsinger's La Comarca Lagunera is a story about radical change. The Comarca Lagunera, roughly the area straddling the southern tip of Coahuila and the southeastern corner of Durango, began the twentieth century as one of Mexico's most productive agricultural regions. By the end of the century, Vargas-Lobsinger explains, the area "with its fields covered with cotton that bestowed fame as one of the richest agricultural regions in the country, no longer exists" (11). One criticism notwithstanding Vargas-Lobsinger's study superbly chronicles this dramatic process and its implications in modern Mexican history.

On the eve of the Mexican Revolution, in 1910, the Comarca Lagunera, also referred as La Laguna, emblematized a Porfirian-era (as the long dictatorship of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz is known that went from 1876 until 1911) economic success story. In about three decades, entrepreneurs had transformed a lowly populated area near the Río Nazas and Río Aguanaval into a center of Mexico's cotton industry. It became the home of a modern, prosperous export center. Such success was, in large part, due to a feudalistic economic model. Absentee hacendados and their partners exploited acasillados and local workers.

This arrangement, Vargas-Lobsinger demonstrates, changed with the Revolution—to a degree. During the armed stage of the revolution, the limit of the upheaval's reach was Pancho Villa's confiscation of some haciendas and the distribution of lands to some generals in the División del Norte. Later, the 1917 Constitution, with its inclusion of Article 27 that concerned land ownership in Mexico, only slightly affected landed capitalists in the region. Revolutionary leaders like Venustiano Carranza (in office from 1914 to 1920) and Álvaro Obregón (1920-1924) vocally advocated land redistribution, but the status quo largely prevailed in the Comarca Lagunera. By Plutarco Elías Calles's presidency, president during the four years after Obregón (and later, serving as the country's behind-the-scenes leader via puppet presidents), the cotton industry recovered from the disruptions stemming from revolutionary fighting in the area and reached new heights. Between 1925 and 1934, according to Vargas-Lobsinger's meticulous research, cotton production had increased by about 25 percent vis-à-vis the decade before the Revolution, and ranked as Mexico's third most valuable export, behind henequen and coffee (90).

Political factors affected the delay in land reform in La Laguna. During the 1920s and the early 1930s, Lagunero landowners lobbied presidential regimes, many times arguing to them that dismantling haciendas would have detrimental effects on Mexico's national economy. Later, when reform became unavoidable, local business conglomerates pondered funding parts of land reform in the region, but with assurances that the districts would be the extent of change. Such machinations for avoiding land reform were complemented by Carranza's and Obregón's lukewarm support for redistribution, and Calles's lack of faith in the economic viability of the ejido system. The confluence of hacendados' efforts and a lack of executive support from Mexico City overcame local labor militancy and political pressures for reform.

President Lázaro Cárdenas, in 1936, quashed the notion that La Laguna would circumvent land redistribution and agrarian reform. In her final chapter, Vargas-Lobsinger methodically describes the complex and rapid expropriation process, which, we learn, the Cárdenas regime conducted in a hasty manner. State officials established funding sources like the Banco Ejidal and oversaw several studies of the viability of land reform, but these efforts were inadequate for successful agrarian reform. Among other problems, many ejidatarios refused to work with one another, agricultural cooperatives failed, and the state could not offer ample inputs and resources, such as machinery and credit for irrigation projects. Some people actually refused the state's offers because...