A Land Between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico ed. by Christopher R. Boyer (review)

This is an intriguing edited volume, squarely centered on and in the sub-discipline of environmental history. It is also, along with a few other volumes, solely dedicated to Mexico’s long record of human-environment relationships. Edited volumes are always a challenge to review as a single, synthetic, product. This effort does score on three points. First, it brings together some excellent and some good essays on episodes of human-environment interaction. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it does this with an international effort across disciplinary and linguistic lines. Many of the chapters here were translated from Spanish, and it is especially pleasing to see some of the excellent work done by our colleagues in Mexico appear in print to a wider Anglophone audience. Third, it offers a first round of sorts for systematic, international environmental history essays on modern Mexico. After an introduction by Boyer, ten substantive essays follow on a range of topics, concluded by Radding’s summary of the chapters and some insights on what might come next for environmental histories of (modern) Mexico. There is some prominence given to water (rural, urban, its role in Mexican agrarian history) in this volume for scholars pursuing such a thematic focus.

An introductory essay by Boyer attempts to provide a kind of longue durée perspective to human-environment relationships in Mexico, no simple task. Boyer also does, laudably, invoke the possible nexus of environmental history and political ecology. But his use of intensive versus extensive resource use over time periods does little to clarify the point, and calling the latest era of neoliberalism “savage” seems disingenuous when the Porfiriato was clearly as difficult if not more brutal in many ways. This last point is especially striking considering how many of the chapters squarely detail the brutality and large land tenure appropriations under the mid-19th century so-called disentailment efforts and the later Porfirian schemes (1880-1910), both of which undermined communal notions of resource control. Perhaps more useful would have been some treatment as to the swing and sway of preferred tenure regimes over time, such as tendencies towards private, communal, or shared property arrangements.

The strengths of A Land Between Waters lie in chapters 2-4, 6, 7, and notably 11 (on marine historical ecologies of the pearl industry) for their original, empirical, and detailed reconstructions of actual episodes of environmental history. To be sure, it is nearly impossible to cram a book’s worth of material into a single chapter as Evans and Santiago respectively do in chapters 7 and 8. The authors, as a whole and to a person, are on firm ground when they argue with or based on the details of historical documents. These particulars matter, otherwise there is no point to doing environmental history. However, a few authors tread dangerously over brittle ground when they sway towards normative statements about human-environment relationships (in general), since there is much less to say here that seems original, or when they lose track of the central characters (the people!) in their stories.

Wakild tackles the important and dynamic changing nature of Chapultepec as a “park” for multiple purposes in Mexican history. She includes a round critique and assessment that this is not a park in the North American sense, predicated on its false notion of wild or wilderness, but one that reflects a nation’s travails as it grappled with its own sense of environmental history. Acknowledging that the volume is about “modern Mexico,” I was still surprised by the lack of mention of pre-colonial aspects of socio-nature. As contact period literature has amply documented, for example, Moctecuzoma, the last of the Triple Alliance leaders, had his own zoo. Was that not a park? And how might using that example connect with Wakild’s notion that these later parks are also forms of...