A Land between Waters

Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico

Bibliographic Data

ID2793995
AuthorsVera S Candiani (Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume93
Issue3
Pages519-521
Publication date2013-08-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2211029
OpenAlexW2329007519
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Mexicans have long enjoyed a huge advantage over their North American neighbors. A tradition of translating and inexpensively publishing canonical non-Spanish works in history has given monolingual Mexican readers access to foreign authors alongside homegrown ones. This advantage is pronounced in environmental history. Books by John R. McNeill, Donald Worster, Elinor Melville, and others have come out in Spanish, while those by Antonio Elio Brailovsky and Guillermo Castro Herrera, along with some of the authors included in the collection under review here, are unavailable in English. By assembling historians from both sides of the Mexico– United States border in A Land between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico, Christopher R. Boyer has begun to redress this imbalance and to breach the linguistic and historiographical divide it created.In an introductory chapter, Boyer describes six cycles of political ecology marking Mexican history from the late colonial period to 2011, each characterized by a peculiar relationship between political regimes and modes of social uses of nature. The chapters explore the correspondence between intensive interventions in nature and centralized regimes (the Bourbon reforms, the Porfiriato, and the Mexican Miracle); between extensive interventions and periods of decentralized political power (the wars of independence and the age of caudillos, the Mexican Revolution and the first decades of the Sonoran Dynasty); and, finally, between a “savage” mode of intervention and the decentralized power of present-day neoliberalism (p. 5).The volume presents varied topics and approaches. Class analysis appears in Myrna Santiago’s examination of how the oil industry in Veracruz unevenly distributed ecological and health costs prior to 1938, and in Angus Wright’s discussion of soil usage in pre-Hispanic Mixtec society, which he uses to disassemble the notions of degraded soils and the Green Revolution that only aggravated soil problems in Mexico. Both Emily Wakild, studying the national park system and Chapultepec Park, and Rick López, examining the Royal Botanical Garden, use the tools of cultural history to show how intellectual and social tensions shaped how plant life and vegetated landscapes were understood, demarcated, and used under different political regimes. Economic history appears in José Juan Juárez Flores’s chapter on how industrialization and urbanization promoted destructive uses of the woodlands of La Malintzin in Tlaxcala by both communal and profiteering agents, and in Sterling Evans’s study of how both plantation henequen production and peasant communal farming were at odds with the ecology of Yucatecan brushlands and the indigenous itinerant agriculture it sustained. Other contributors use notions from the history of technology. Martín Sánchez Rodríguez, for instance, disrupts prevailing explanations of the Bajío’s rise as Mexico’s breadbasket with his discovery of a local technological innovation — the cajas de agua — that permitted the retention of torrential rains and flood farming. Micheline Cariño and Mario Monteforte trace the tension between transferred and autochthonous technologies and between predatory and sustainable entrepreneurial models in pearl aquaculture in the Gulf of California. Masterfully, Alejandro Tortolero Villaseñor and Luis Aboites Aguilar apply all these approaches to agricultural and urban water infrastructure, bursting open the conventional understanding of Zapatismo in 1910 Morelos and the rise and crisis of the post-revolutionary national state.Unifying this variety is the skill with which the authors collectively steer the volume away from the gravitational pull of the declension narrative, navigating instead toward the hidden ecological workings of modern Mexican history. Such dexterity did not come out of nowhere: as Cynthia Radding points out in her closing remarks, Mexican environmental history grew under the roof of archaeology, anthropology, and agro-ecology, all disciplines with venerable and capacious institutions. Environmental history may manifest institutionally in different ways on either side of the border, but the environmental mode of historical analysis is hardly in its infancy in Mexico, perhaps as a result of the stronger influence there of the Annales School’s histoire totale.This “snapshot of modern Mexican environmental historiography at this stage of its development” (p. 14) is a well-executed chiaroscuro: it draws attention to the periods, issues, and findings that are illuminated in its pages as well as those that are not. Shimmering brightly in the light is the conclusion that neither the intensive nor the extensive mode of political ecology corresponds to greater or lesser environmental destruction or recovery. On the other hand, the decades between the collapse of Spanish rule and the stabilization of the oligarchic republic under Porfirio Díaz remain unlit, despite being one of the most pregnant periods for the alternation between centralization and decen-tralization. John Tutino, Peter Guardino, and others have shown how everything was up for grabs then, as class, regional, and ideological priorities meshed and clashed over the creation — or imposition — of Mexico. None of the essays illuminate the environmental dimensions of these struggles — a pity both historiographically and in view of the volume’s stated intent of providing Mexicans with insights that might prevent them “from rushing headlong into an increasingly clouded future” (p. 16). With both its parallels and differences with the present state of affairs, where the adequacy of the nation-state itself is in question, the environmental history of this key period should not remain unexplored for long. May it be published in as fine a collection as this

Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Environmental history · Ethnology · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · History · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics

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