Description
Book SynopsisMikael D. Wolfe transforms our understanding of the Mexican revolution and agrarian reform through an environmental and technological history of water management in the emblematic Laguna region, showing how the contested modernization of the region's irrigation network unintentionally contaminated the water supply, deepened social inequality, and undermined reform efforts.
Trade Review"[
Watering the Revolution] will alter how scholars understand Mexico’s emblematic agrarian reform in La Laguna and, one would hope, how teachers teach it. . . . Without a doubt a major contribution to the field." -- Matthew Vitz * H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews *
"This book provides an almost entirely new disciplinary focus in Latin America by addressing the complex relationship between the environment and development: envirotech history. . . . Pioneering." -- Gavin O'Toole * Latin American Review of Books *
"Mikael Wolfe has delivered a pivotally important contribution to the ongoing transformation of our understanding of Mexico during its long, often conflictive, always contested twentieth century." -- John Tutino * Journal of Social History *
"Wolfe . . . meticulously unpack[s] the history of social conflict and revolutionary water management in northern Mexico’s La Laguna cotton heartland during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries." -- Patrick Cosby * H-Water, H-Net Reviews *
"This book provides important insights into the tensions between the need to develop water resources sustainably and the need for socio-economic development. . . . A definite ‘must’ for scholars of Mexican agrarian history and scholars interested in understanding how politics, technology and the environment intertwine to shape the dynamics of water resources development and its impacts on society." -- Jaime Hoogesteger * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *
"A revealing portrait of the difficulties that undergird the rapprochement of economic development and environmental conservation,
Watering the Revolution is necessary reading for upper-level undergraduate and graduate environmental history courses across geographical boundaries." -- Ela Miljkovic * Environment and History *
"A landmark study. . . . This fresh vision of Mexican history over the long twentieth century should be considered as required reading for historians of technology, the environment, agrarian politics, and society in Latin America and beyond." -- Christopher Boyer * Environmental History *
“A smart, well-crafted book.” -- Casey Walsh * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *
“The publication of this book by Mikael D. Wolfe is very good news for all scholars concerned with the twentieth-century history of Mexico and Latin America. Highly commended.” -- Luis Aboites Aguilar * Hispanic American Historical Review *
“An impressive work of scholarship. Mikael D. Wolfe masterfully rewrites the history of Mexico’s arid north-central Laguna region.” -- Helga Baitenmann * Journal of Latin American Studies *
"Though Wolfe’s research must fit into a broad spectrum of studies of the Laguna, the book’s focus on environmental history and its relationship to the history of technology differentiate this work from a long list of other publications. Indeed, it takes its rightful place in a current of Mexicanist historiography that chooses not to separate hydraulic and agrarian issues when studying diverse social spaces." -- Antonio Escobar Ohmstede * American Historical Review *
"Wolfe’s book is interesting, convincing, and challenging. It is thorough, focused, and appropriately backed by statistical data." -- Eitan Ginzberg * EIAL *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Part I. El Agua de la Revolución (The Water of the Revolution)
1. River of Revolution 23
2. The Debate over Damming and Pumping El Agua de la Revolución 59
3. Distributing El Agua de la Revolución 95
Part II. The Second Agrarian Reform
4. Life and Work on the Revolutionary Dam Site and Ejidos 131
5. (Counter)Revolutionary Dam, Pumps, and Pesticides 163
6. Rehabilitating El Agua de la Revolución 191
Epilogue. The Legacies of Water Use and Abuse in Neoliberal Mexico 219
Appendixes 231
Notes 239
Bibliography 287
Index 305
