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

Two related arguments frame this book. Both are provocative and, on the whole, convincing. The first is that historians have failed to see the connections between rural reform in the United States and land reforms in Mexico in the 1930s, an era in which both nations confronted the problem of agrarian inequality, albeit in different ways. The second is that historians, because they have not paid attention to the interactions of Mexican and US rural reformers, have missed the truer origins of the "green revolution" and seen it solely as a product of US Cold War–era imperialism rather than as an outgrowth of earlier attempts to solve the problem of rural poverty within the United States, especially in the US South. According to Olsson, these stories have been lost because of the intellectual traditions that divide the histories of the United States and Mexico (and Latin America generally) and prevent us from seeing how much these nations had in common in the not-too-distant past.

Olsson explains in his introduction that "this book is not a comparative history but rather a history of comparisons, a study of interactions and exchanges," and the chapters are carefully organized to show how these evolved over time (4). The US South and rural Mexico, especially the cotton-growing region of La Laguna in Coahuila and Durango, shared similar trajectories between the 1870s and the 1920s. Olsson parallels these histories, demonstrating how the consolidation of large landholdings in both regions fed rural dissatisfaction and, ultimately, disruptive challenges to the plantation order. While the Populist revolt and the Mexican Revolution differed in scale and results, both nevertheless forced consideration of the plight of the rural poor. In both the United States and Mexico that consideration came in the crucible of the Great Depression, when cross-border networks of agrarian reformers searched for solutions in both Mexico and the United States. Socialists like H. L. Mitchell, head of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and those Olsson identifies as "agrarian" New Dealers—the relatively small but influential group within the US Department of Agriculture who championed greater equality and solutions to rural poverty—looked to the redistribution campaign undertaken by Lázaro Cárdenas for inspiration in their attempts to solve the widespread displacement of tenants following implementation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. At the same time, Mexican reformers took lessons from New Deal reforms. Just as important, they found support for land redistribution among influential New Dealers—especially Ambassador Josephus Daniels and Vice President Henry A. Wallace—which helped to blunt criticism of land appropriation that would normally have emanated from Washington.

In the 1940s and into the Cold War, ardor for rural reform at the government level declined both in the United States and in Mexico. Nevertheless, reformers in non-governmental agencies, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, sustained the connections between the US South and Mexico. The Rockefeller Foundation's Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP), Olsson argues, was informed by its work funding hookworm eradication programs and supporting Rosenwald Schools for African Americans in the South in the first decades of the twentieth century. Begun in 1943, MAP focused first on campesinos' and smallholders' quality of life, much as the foundation had done in the South. Only over time did it come to push hybrid corn and chemical fertilizers, activities born of the near-monomaniacal focus on aggregate food supplies that was the green revolution's hallmark.

Olsson's final chapter, on President Miguel Alemán's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring the higher modernism of the Tennessee Valley Authority's flood control projects to southern Mexico in the late 1940s, demonstrates how the wide range of possibilities for addressing rural poverty that reformers had envisioned in the 1930s had tightened in Mexico as it had in the United States. In both countries, advocates of agricultural modernization won out. There is something useful, Olsson suggests...