The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938 (review)

There have in the last several decades been many studies of the early Mexican oil industry. Such works commonly treat the landscape of the Huasteca—the center of the early Mexican oil industry—as merely the geographic backdrop against which the human actors—landowners, oil workers, U.S. and European oilmen, government officials—acted. Myrna Santiago presents an ambitious reframing of this story from an environmental history perspective. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources, she argues that the development of the Mexican oil industry resulted not just in economic and social upheavals, but required the transformation—ultimately the complete destruction—of the environment of the Huasteca. "Oil produced its own ecology" (p. 342), she summarizes succinctly.

Divided into three parts, the book explores the ecology and society of the Huasteca from the early nineteenth century until the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938. The first section examines the landscape and its inhabitants prior to the discovery of oil. The author portrays the natural landscape of the Huasteca as a pristine and richly diverse environment, while characterizing conflicts between the indigenous inhabitants of the region and modernizing hacendados as embodying competing views of the landscape and its value. The indigenous peoples lived in equilibrium with the natural environment of the region, while "the Mexican elites interpreted the rainforest as a place filled entirely with 'wild' plants and animals to the exclusion of human beings" (p. 36).

The second section details the ecological changes—very broadly defined—occurring with the arrival of foreign oilmen in the region. Santiago discusses their transformation of land tenure in the service of oil development, and the alteration of the landscape and environment by the oil industry. Particularly interesting is the discussion of the ideological environment. The author maintains that massive environmental changes were supported by a gendered ideology of modernity. E. L. Doheny, Weetman Pearson, and other oil entrepreneurs brought to the task a new discourse of modernity, in which the radical transformation of the landscape reflected masculine virtue and virility. In discussing the environmental impact of runaway wells and oil fires, the author notes "rather than understanding such events as cautionary tales about oil exploitation—the lesson motivating indigenous resistance, for instance—the oilmen typically interpreted the episodes as challenges to and assertions of their masculinity" (p. 145). Oil development also transformed the region's "social ecology," through the creation of a new and highly stratified society among the oil camps and producing fields.

In the final section, Santiago explores the intersection of oil development with the Mexican revolution. She argues that revolutionary upheaval brought an end to the dominance of the U.S. and European oil companies in the Huasteca. The revolution also created a new national leadership, and produced a new vision of oil that stressed conservation for the benefit of society. Interestingly, the author does not see the revolutionary state as the main challenger to big oil. She credits the oil workers with dogged—though often pyrrhic—resistance to the oil companies, and assigns to them primary responsibility for the nationalization of the industry in 1938. She argues that, in the development of the movement for nationalization, "It was the revolution from below that made all the difference" (p. 340).

Certain concerns about the book should be noted. Santiago's portrayal of the pre-petroleum rainforest and indigenous land use patters seem slightly idealized, if only because of the contrast with the environmentally disastrous practices of the oil companies. Her characterization of indigenous resistance as "ecological warfare" also invites further analysis. Despite these concerns, the author has produced an imaginative and well researched account of oil development in the Mexican Huasteca. It will be indispensable reading for historians of the oil industry in Latin America, and as well as for specialists in environmental history. It is also accessible to graduate and advanced undergraduate students of Latin American history...