Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside by Tore C. Olsson (review)

Tore Olsson's pathbreaking book, Agrarian Crossings, examines the ways in which Mexican and U.S. reformers promoted agrarian justice and productivity in the U.S. South and the Mexican countryside during the middle years of the twentieth century. In so doing, Olsson reveals the complicated transnational entanglements of these campaigns, revealing the many histories of state actors holding dialogues across national lines and once again—like other borderlands and transnational historians—casting doubt on the full utility of "the disciplinary distinction between 'American' and 'Latin American' history" (3).

Olsson begins by demonstrating the parallel development of the Mexican countryside and the U.S. South from the 1870s through the 1920s, both of which contributed to expressions of discontent among the rural poor that were ideologically similar: namely, the Mexican Revolution and the U.S. Populist revolt. No coincidence, then, that reformist politicians rose to power in both nations within a few years of one another—in Mexico, Lázaro Cardenas, and in the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who promised to relieve each respective nation's countryside of its innumerable woes. In chapter 2, the author explores how left-leaning reformers from the United States sought to transplant some of the lessons of the Mexican revolutionary state into the U.S. South to the relief of sharecroppers. Even mainstream New Deal bureaucrats believed that the U.S. government stood to learn much from Mexican agrarismo. Likewise, in chapter 3, cardenistas in Mexico "sought guidance and inspiration in the New Deal's evolving program of rural social transformation" in its attempts to deliver on the Mexican Revolution's agro-reformist promises.

Olsson shifts gears in chapter 4, demonstrating that the Rockefeller Foundation's advent of the so-called "Green Revolution" (technical assistance to Mexican corn producers beginning in 1943) lay in the laboratories of the U.S. South, not in Cold War geopolitics as some historians have assumed. The Green Revolution's promise of stability to Mexico's farmers went quickly unfulfilled, however, for two reasons: first, the nationalist policies of Mexico's President Miguel Alemán, elected in 1946, lost favor to "programs promising to boost food production and siphon the rural population to the urban center" (157); and second, U.S. reformers and philanthropies like Rockefeller shifted focus from Mexico to the Third World due to Cold War geopolitical concerns, in turn shifting their collective focus in Mexico from corn to wheat production. The Green Revolution became a useful U.S. example of productivity and efficiency to Third World producers while at the same time failing the corn-based producers dominating the Mexican countryside. Nonetheless, Mexican officials remained enamored of the New Deal state, as seen in chapter 6, seeking into the 1950s to replicate the promises of hydroelectric development demonstrated by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Agrarian Crossings is a detailed, smart, and engaging study that places Mexican and U.S. rural development during the twentieth century in dialogue with one another. By blurring national boundaries, Olsson has effectively revealed a previously hidden U.S.-Mexican dialogue that began with the worldwide economic crash of the 1930s and came to an end in the early 1950s. In his epilogue, Olsson writes, "what is entirely certain . . . is that past and future dilemmas over land, food, water and population were not and will not be segregated by the artificial dichotomies of Global North and Global South, of First World and Third World" (199). Indeed. Specialists, students, and interested laypersons alike stand to learn much from this crucially important and timely book.