The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico by John J. Dwyer (review)

Book Reviews This study offers valuable and refreshing insights into the politics of representation involved in indigenismo, and will be of interest to all scholars of Latin American studies, and subaltern studies in general. Zoya Khan Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures University of South Alabama THE AGRARIAN DISPUTE: THE EXPROPRIATION OF AMERICAN-OWNED RURAL LAND IN POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO. By John J. Dwyer. Durham: Duke UP, 2008, p. 387, $24.95. Most scholars who study U.S. foreign policy argue that the United States responded with accommodation rather than outright confrontation to Mexico’s expropriation of U.S. oil interests in 1938 because the U.S. needed Mexico to remain an ally in World War II. In The Agrarian Dispute John J. Dwyer argues that our focus on the 1938 oil expropriation is misplaced . Dwyer uses case studies of land expropriation in Sonora’s Yaqui Valley and Baja California’s Mexicali Valley to demonstrate that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy had already adopted a policy of accommodation by 1935. While making his case for a reappraisal of U.S. foreign policy, Dwyer also insists that it is time for historians to move beyond balkanized history, the much too narrow focus on a single set of actors—be they women, diplomats, political elites, peasants , etc.—and adopt a much messier, more complex narrative that takes into account a range of actors and historical approaches, including social, cultural, economic and diplomatic history. By linking domestic political pressures on both sides of the border to the diplomatic strategies adopted by political leaders, Dwyer is able to demonstrate that everyday people were not just the pawns of elite powerbrokers, but rather influential actors in their own right. The two case studies that Dwyer uses demonstrate the historical contingency of land expropriation in postrevolutionary Mexico. In Baja California , Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas worked closely with the Colorado River Land Company (CRLC), a U.S.- based land development business, instead of siding with local Mexicans for a number of reasons. First, the Mexicali Valley was a major cotton-growing area and thus attracted mostly seasonably mobile jornaleros (day laborers), many of whom stayed only a short while before crossing the border to look for work in the United States. Second, the CRLC had already invested a lot of capital into the Mexicali Valley, making the cost of turning the area over to ejidatarios highly expensive . Third, the area was relatively underpopulated, and Cárdenas appointed Baja California’s governors, so expropriating the CRLC’s lands would probably have brought little political gain. Instead of working with the jornaleros, Cárdenas promoted the CRLC’s colonization scheme as an 75 The Latin Americanist, December 2009 economic opportunity for Mexicans, in the process setting the stage for a 1937 land invasion. Many jornaleros who migrated to the region could not find enough work to escape poverty. In addition, many were also forced to work for Asian immigrants (who were already renting land from the CRLC). This led not only to increased class consciousness, but also race consciousness. When neither federal nor local authorities responded to their demands, they invaded the CRLC’s lands, thus forcing Cárdenas’ hand. The dynamics in Sonora were quite different. A conservative political faction backed largely by large land owners and the Catholic Church took power under the leadership of Román Yocupicio in 1936. Campesinos in the Yaqui Valley would not have to invade and squat on Americanowned lands settled by the Richardson Construction Company beginning in 1904. Instead, Cárdenas would use the expropriation and redistribution of these lands to undermine his political opponents even as he expanded his political base. Yocupicio, a Mayo Indian and former general under Obregón who had led a military campaign against the Yaqui in 1926 and 1927, promoted the repatriation of those very same Yaqui to their ancestral homeland as a means of broadening his political support. Nonetheless, Yocupicio was against land reform for both ideological and political reasons. He believed that Mexican peasants lacked both the capital and the know-how to engage in modern agriculture. In addition, he was concerned that expropriating American-owned small...