Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos After Zapata, 1920–1940 by Salvador Salinas (review)

Salvador Salinas examines the postrevolutionary reconstruction of the state of Morelos “using the lens of environmental history” (4). His study of agrarian reform in Morelos focuses not just on land, but also on forests and water. Taken together, he argues, shifts in the distribution and use of natural resources in the 1920s and 1930s fundamentally transformed the political ecology of the region. In the aftermath of ecological and demographic devastation, the pueblos of Morelos seized control of the state’s natural resources with the help of the federal government, which in turn helped “the rural communities become better custodians of the environment” as they accepted federal intervention in the regulation of forests and water (5). As the ejido replaced the hacienda, federal institutions and agencies became a standard feature of village life—a transformation that, according to Salinas, entailed a change in “the idea of what it meant to be a pueblo” (3). The solidarity that characterized the pueblos before the Revolution was gone, and in its place emerged a nineteenth-century notion of village sovereignty, reimagined in a new context. In the pueblos of postrevolutionary Morelos, engaging the state did not compel a loss of sovereignty but actually “made the pueblos more sovereign” (5). Nowhere was this enhanced sovereignty more evident than in the state’s regulation of the use of the region’s natural resources.

The body of the book consists of overlapping studies of land, forest, and water reforms in Morelos, culminating in the expansion of the region’s rice bowl. In all cases, the villagers of Morelos used federal institutions to advance their interests against those opposed to the reforms (sugar planters and smallholders), yielding a comparatively heavy state presence in the region, but one, Salinas argues, that was not just centralizing, but also democratizing. As power increasingly passed from town councils—nests of elite power—to democratically elected ejidal assemblies, villagers in Morelos played a direct role in shaping reforms and in negotiations with state agencies and institutions. Although land reform was fundamental in Morelos (by the end of the 1920s, 80 percent of the state’s population cultivated ejidal lands), irrigation waters became the most important resource in the densely populated central lowlands.

The shift from sugar cultivation to rice required that the state’s irrigation system be regulated and retrofitted to ensure more equitable access to water. In 1926, federal juntas de aguas were created to administer all the natural sources of water and arbitrate disputes over their use. The juntas de aguas became lightning rods for discontent, but their intervention gave ejidatarios the opportunity to grow commercial crops, most notably rice. Made possible by the federal regulation of irrigation waters and credit from the National Agrarian Bank, rice cultivation enhanced the sovereignty of the pueblos, giving them the opportunity to participate in the market without abandoning their goals of feeding themselves. Salinas’s chapter on the rizicultural revolution could be either a culmination of previous chapters or a stand-alone study. It is perhaps less integrated than the other chapters, but fascinating nonetheless.

The author’s “more holistic approach” (5) pays heavy dividends—this is an excellent and enlightening monograph—but larger questions of village sovereignty, so prominent in the introduction, take a backseat to a nuts-and-bolts analysis of the reform process. That said, only in the final chapter does the focus on land and water veer slightly off course. In his examination of the Tallarín revolt in 1934, Salinas’s insistence on the importance of local agrarian factors forces into the background more obvious and important cultural issues that do not fit so neatly into his paradigm. But this is hardly a fatal flaw, and it does nothing to diminish Salinas’s contribution. This is a well-crafted, thoughtfully imagined, and lucidly written study that will change the way we see Zapatismo. At its heart, this is a study of state formation, but environmental historians of...