The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico (review)

Between 1927 and 1940 the Mexican government, principally during the regime of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), expropriated more than six million acres of prime agricultural land, most of it from the American-owned Colorado River Land Company and the Richardson Construction Company, in the Mexicali Valley of Baja California and the Yaqui Valley of the State of Sonora, respectively, but also from individual American owners. At the very end of this period, in 1938, foreign petroleum companies were similarly expropriated. The agricultural holdings were mostly distributed to peasants (agraristas) in the form of the collectively-owned farms (ejidos) envisioned by Mexican land reformers and mandated by the revolutionary constitution of 1917, while the petroleum holdings were taken over by the national state, both with compensation to the aggrieved American owners. It is one of John Dwyer’s main contentions that, stressful as the 1938 petroleum expropriation might have been for relations between Mexico and the United States, it was relatively peaceful since the ground had been prepared by the earlier seizure of agricultural holdings and the eventual settlement of American claims by a bi-national commission established for this purpose. Behind these protracted but effective negotiations lay a sympathetic attitude on the part of the Roosevelt administration and adroit diplomatic maneuvering by Mexican officials in the Cárdenas government. In tracing the intricate history of these events, Dwyer has given us an empirically rich, thoughtful, and very clearly written account of the social and economic history of the Mexicali and Yaqui Valleys, and of the diplomatic imbroglio, that ties the positions of the two parties not only into the history of their long-term relations, but also to the domestic political realities of the time, chiefly in Mexico.

Dwyer sees the two regions as “case studies” in the politics of agrarian reform (although what the range of other cases is he never quite specifies), particularly emphasizing in both instances the upward ripple of peasant agency as significantly influencing international relations. Against these forces he deploys four central issues: the reasons (primarily economic) for peasant mobilization, the ideological and domestic political motives for President Cárdenas’s actions, Washington’s reactions to the loss of American-owned properties, and the diplomatic tactics (mainly delay) employed by Mexico to gain the most advantageous possible position in the negotiations over compensation. He thus creates a sort of matrix of cross-cutting factors that serves him well in integrating narrative and analytic approaches. To take the case of Baja California and the Colorado River Land Company as an example of Dwyer’s findings, he shows that on the Mexican side bad working conditions, low wages, underemployment, and the competition of Chinese immigrant labor provoked petitions for the creation of ejidos in the 1920s and early 1930s, accompanied by peasant squatting on CRLC lands. The state governor’s support of the Company and its CEO Harry Chandler (of the Los Angeles Chandlers) increased the militancy of rural workers in favor of land redistribution and aggravated the xenophobic tone of their rhetoric. A full-scale invasion of CRLC lands early in 1937 forced Cárdenas’s hand, eventually producing bi-national agreement for an indemnification that was not completed until 1955. On the U.S. side, the “Jeffersonian idealism” of FDR and Ambassador Josephus Daniels induced sympathy for agrarian reforms, supported by a more general strain of “agrarian romanticism” among Roosevelt’s fellow travelers. Nor was an element of Realpolitik absent from FDR’s policies, however, since many in his administration viewed land redistribution, albeit at the expense of American owners, as a means to repatriate Mexican workers during the Depression, and support of Cárdenas as preferable to more radical alternatives. Dwyer makes it very clear that the pressures of the Depression on both sides of the border, and not the advent of World War II, stood behind Washington’s sympathy to (or tolerance of...