Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico by Mikael D. Wolfe (review)

In Watering the Revolution, Mikael D. Wolfe demonstrates that we cannot understand the Mexican Revolution without examining its environmental history. The roots of the Mexican Revolution dig into the late nineteenth century, when following French occupation, Porfirio Díaz ruled for over thirty years as Mexico's dictator. Under Díaz, the nation witnessed increased economic growth in mining, railroads, and agriculture, but the fruits of that prosperity were distributed unevenly across society. His succession in 1910 set off a violent social revolution. Bloody battles for the presidency began with Francisco Madero in 1910, and ended with the 1940 election of Manuel Ávila Camacho (the period is known as the long Mexican Revolution). The secondary literature studying this era reflects generational waves, beginning with what Alan Knight's "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution" identifies in the 1930s and 1940s as participant/observers, whose work combined politics with personal commentary. They laid the groundwork for the 1950s and 1960s generation, which emphasized academic accounts of national elites, government actors, and major events. In the 1960s, this expanded to include social histories such as John Womack's classic Zapata and the Revolution (1970). In the 1980s, revisionist histories reconsidered the Porfiriato, the revolution's agrarian nature, and the postrevolutionary period. As early as the 1990s, Latin American scholars began applying diverse frameworks to this period, including the history of technology. Moreover, recent interpretations place it within larger methodological fields such as gender studies and transnational history.

Upon this rich literary corpus, Wolfe adds yet another layer to the Mexican Revolution: the agency and significance of the técnicos charged with redistributing water among farmers in the cotton-rich Laguna region of north-central Mexico. Here, an environmental study coalesces with technology to offer the first envirotech history of Mexican agrarian reform; defined as "an interdependence between human ingenuity and nonhuman nature in this relatively sustainable hybrid ecosystem" (7). Wolfe argues that during the long Mexican Revolution, agrarian reforms redistributed land relatively quickly and easily, but the redistribution of water undermined that process owing to technological challenges such as unequal access to water, contamination, and a de facto "water apartheid" regime (4). The legacy of these challenges continues to shape the contours of daily life and water inequality in the Laguna region.

Watering the Revolution percolates through a rich archival and periodical record in the United States and Mexico. It narrates water's complex legal history as it was tried and tested in Mexico's Constitution, the courtroom, and on the ground. Divided into two parts, Part I assesses the Porfiriato to the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1940. Part II examines the second agrarian reform from President Lázaro Cárdenas to the 1970s. These sections describe the traditional way of flood-farming in Laguna, (the aniego system) and its transformation with the completion of the Nazas Dam. Hopeful proponents, such as Antonio Guitérrez, argued that the dam would satisfy the Revolution's social agenda: providing land for more people and providing water to everyone. But the dam did not live up to its promise. In part, technologies such as groundwater pumps depleted and contaminated the aquifers, and water access remained unequal and contentious. In the 1950s, drought increased these tensions, compelling ejidatarios (communal landowners), especially women, to seek assistance at local and national levels. This narrative interweaves three important claims. First, the Nazas Dam project embodies what Wolfe terms, "El Agua de la Revolución, Water of the Revolution," the idea that water was not "just an abstract resource over which the state claimed jurisdiction for economic development and growth but also a tangible necessity the state would have to . . . engineer as a matter of social justice" (18). Second, environmental conservation evolved to signify not wasting water, but preservation or protection. Técnicos achieved this through dams, canals, pumps, reservoirs, hydroelectric power...