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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countrysideby Tore C. Olsson Kristin L. Ahlberg Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside. By Tore C. Olsson. America in the World. (Princeton and Oxford, Eng.: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 277. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-16520-2.) Historian of U.S. foreign relations Tore C. Olsson challenges the notion of impenetrable borders—both geographic and intellectual—in his examination of [End Page 1022]U.S. and Mexican agricultural modernization during the earlier part of the twentieth century. Olsson describes this period as "an era of dramatic social and political convergence between the two nations, where dialogue and exchange regarding rural matters was frequent and lively" (p. 3). This robust cross-pollination undergirds Olsson's two major arguments, that the distinction between American history and Latin American history has separated a shared past, even though U.S. and Mexican reform initiatives often purposefully intersected, and that these intersections reflect a globalization that is often absent in the histories of the U.S. South. In advancing this second argument, Olsson challenges the scholars of modernization theory who do not consider the Global South as an incubator for or influencer of development. To the contrary, Olsson suggests, philanthropic organization reform efforts—within the United States and Mexico—served as the catalyst for the Green Revolution. Olsson focuses on three historical episodes: the Mexican Revolution and the U.S. southern Populist revolt, the New Deal, and the Green Revolution. In the first chapter, Olsson adopts a comparative approach to underscore the parallel changes ongoing in Mexico and the southern United States from the 1870s to the 1920s. Both faced a consolidation of power by capitalist landowners and political elites, in part, to secure the production of export commodities. In response, the rebellions occurring in each area "sought to address the inequalities of a countryside in the grip of global capitalism" (p. 23). By sketching these parallel political developments and acknowledging their strengths and limitations, Olsson provides the context for the agricultural collaborations that took place in subsequent years. The second and third chapters, which cover the New Deal period, emphasize the dual transmission of political and agricultural knowledge. In the first instance, U.S. reformers, including many of the New Deal's architects, familiarized themselves with Mexican "revolutionary agrarianism" during their trips to Mexico to view ongoing land reform efforts (p. 41). Olsson asserts that these interactions "played a crucial role in the rural New Deal's radicalization" (p. 71). Mexican planners, many of whom had earned degrees from U.S. universities, also traveled to the United States to observe the impact of successful programs. In other instances, they had to look no further than the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, where U.S. ambassador Josephus Daniels actively championed Mexican land redistribution as "a fundamental prerequisite to justice, peace, and democracy in Mexico" (p. 91). Olsson's strongest chapters are those that detail the origins of the Green Revolution as a phenomenon with roots in the U.S. South and Mexico. The Rockefeller Foundation's efforts at agricultural improvement, he demonstrates, predated the Cold War impetus to feed impoverished peoples as a bulwark against communism. Indeed, the revolution's origins rested in the foundation's General Education Board initiatives directed at the southern United States during the early part of the twentieth century. By 1943, the foundation had collaborated with Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho to establish the Mexican Agricultural Program, aimed at improving crop productivity and living standards by replicating some of the successes of agrarian innovation found in the U.S. South. These efforts, Olsson asserts, undermine the argument that the United States sought to impose a unitary form of "'Americanization'" on Third World [End Page 1023]agriculture; in this instance, "the Rockefeller Foundation's leadership digested its long experience within the fractured US South to plan a research program tailored to the economic limitations" of Mexican smallholders (pp. 101, 144). Yet geopolitical exigencies meant that the successful Mexican program was soon transplanted abroad as a panacea for global hunger, even though the agrarian conditions in other countries...