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

Mikael Wolfe's superb first book gives us a powerful history of twentieth-century, post-revolutionary Mexico through a new lens. This is a political story that foregrounds technology and the environment without losing sight of human agency and social relations. Focused on water in La Laguna—a fertile agricultural region in Mexico's far north and the country's leading cotton producing region for nearly 150 years—Wolfe shows us that water is socially constructed, political contested, and technologically engineered. Here water is not simply a natural endowment, a fixed element of Mexico's predominately semi-arid physical landscape. Nor is it simply a function of supply and demand, of market forces in the regional or national economy that set its price and determined its use. Water was constructed, contested, and engineered, and ultimately the fate of water—and consequently the fate of the regional economy and the lives of those who lived and worked there—was a function of politics.

Wolfe's version of Mexico's post-revolutionary history from the 1920s to the 1960s offers a familiar political economy centered around three dominant interests: state-led development (and the interests of the state generally), private investment by domestic entrepreneurs and foreign firms, and the demands of campesinos and laborers for social justice in the form of land, water, and jobs. But the story he tells is considerably richer than most, as he traces the technological and political projects to develop La Laguna's water through two broad phases. The first linked regional development and rural justice to damming the Río Nazas as a modernizing replacement of the traditional aniegosystem of channels, small dams, and levees. Eventually, when the Palmito dam could no longer satisfy the interests of agricultural development in the face of population growth, the attention of investors and the state's engineers turned in the second phase to aggressive groundwater pumping. In both phases, Wolfe argues persuasively, engineers working for the state clearly understood the deleterious environmental consequences of intensive hydrological engineering. In each phase, the state's interest in placating investors and minimizing rural discontent drove developmentalist policies that worked hand-in-hand with private capital to engineer water abundance. Techno-politics, in Wolfe's term, drove myopic and destructive policy decisions.

Part I of the book examines the efforts to dam the Río Nazas that were first pushed by Francisco I. Madero in 1906, four years before he would open the doors of a decade of revolutionary conflict. Madero assured local cotton farmers that the dam would allow more consistent and fair distribution of water. To counter their concerns about soil deterioration, he touted the benefits of chemical fertilizers, recently proven, he argued, in the United States and Germany. By the 1930s, the dam project was also embraced by the region's campesinos, who saw in it the potential to realize the promise of Article 27 of the revolutionary Constitution of 1917 "to equitably distribute public wealth" (p. 56). The dam became part and parcel of the Cardenista push for agrarian reform which distributed 45 million acres of land to 11,000 collective farms, or ejidos.

But the dam would not be fully completed until 1946 under the presidency of Miguel Alemán. Where Cárdenas had built his political base on the support of campesinos and workers while promoting state-led development, Alemán shifted policy rightward and more narrowly toward industrialization. By the 1950s, cotton planters and engineers turned to groundwater pumping to solve recurrent water shortages, and one of the more fascinating sub-stories in this book recounts the introduction and diffusion of U.S.-made water pumps, culminating in the construction of a local Worthington pump factory in 1951. In La Laguna, the dam and the explosion of deep-well pumping together with a heavy application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in Mexico...