Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos after Zapata, 1920–1940

Abstract

There is a voluminous literature on Zapatismo during the Mexican Revolution. There is far less, however, on postrevolutionary Zapatismo, especially its hydraulic dimension. After all, the Zapatistas did not just demand land; they also demanded water, without which land was useless for agriculture. And in so doing, Zapatista villagers changed their relationship not only to their environment but also to the federal government.This is the story that Salvador Salinas ably tells in Land, Liberty, and Water. The book builds on a growing historiography focusing on water and revolution in modern Mexico, most notably the scholarship of Alejandro Tortolero Villaseñor, who has also worked on Morelos. Salinas draws on environmental history to show how pueblos exercised their newfound political power acquired through the 1910s Zapatista war for “land and liberty” in order to ensure continued access to critical natural resources, especially water, in the 1920s and 1930s (p. 4). He makes clear that Zapatista villagers “were not protoenvironmentalists with romantic views of the wilderness” but rather “tended to express a pragmatic and evolving view of the environment that sought to balance exploitation and conservation” (pp. 19–20). Unsurprisingly, with economic recovery exploitation trumped conservation, prompting the federal government to mandate conservation measures. But, as Salinas demonstrates through various examples such as deforestation caused by charcoal production, the federal government was frequently unable to enforce such measures.A particularly valuable chapter of the book is on the little-known history of rice production, which sustained an alternative livelihood to larger-scale sugar production. Salinas argues that a “hydraulic revolution” in irrigation made the expansion of a “rice bowl” in Morelos possible. Interestingly, he describes rice as a “democratic crop that supported both the commercial and subsistence economies of the villages” because of villagers' ability to negotiate prices and make it more “accessible to all social classes” (pp. 132, 142). Yet, in the end, rice remained a luxury item in Mexico despite villagers' ability to make rice more accessible. The crop also brought an ecological side effect: an increase in malaria, thanks to the ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes that the Morelos climate and rice paddies in particular created. As a result, the federal government undertook, with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, a largely top-down public health campaign to eradicate malaria from rice-growing areas.Salinas's book is insightful and reveals fascinating new material about postrevolutionary Morelos, but his approach to environmental history leaves much to be desired. First, though Salinas cites numerous major works of Latin American environmental history in a footnote, he does not furnish his own definition or conceptualization of environmental history, either more generally or in a Latin American (much less Mexican) context (p. 188n7). Second, though he argues against Eric Wolf's notion of “closed corporate peasant communities” and rightly points out that pueblos were not necessarily conservationist vis-à-vis natural resource management, there is relatively little discussion about divisions within pueblos regarding access to and distribution of resources (p. 15). Third, there is surprisingly no mention either of Mexico's principal federal forester and conservationist, Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, or of Indigenous perspectives on nature, even though both were very influential in Morelos's environmental history.Finally, the last chapter, on the 1934–38 revolt of Enrique Rodríguez (whose nickname was the Noodle), is somewhat disjointed from the other chapters, abruptly shifting the book's focus to a single individual's struggle against the Lázaro Cárdenas government in defense of “agrarian self-reliance, traditional chieftainship, and [pueblos'] religious liberty” (p. 145). While Salinas contextualizes the history of the Rodríguez revolt within the pueblos' environmental and political struggles discussed in the first two chapters, this last chapter is based on a previously published article in the Journal of Latin American Studies. It is of course perfectly fine to incorporate previous work, but for the sake of the book's narrative cohesion, it might have been more fruitful to just reference the article and instead extend the history of the pueblos beyond 1940. For if, as Salinas convincingly argues, postrevolutionary pueblo dynamics in Morelos changed considerably during the 1920s and 1930s, then surely the industrialization and urbanization that greatly accelerated after 1940 transformed the pueblos even more dramatically—particularly their environment.Overall, notwithstanding these criticisms, Salinas's book not only makes an important contribution to modern Mexican history but also makes for illuminating reading for an upper undergraduate course or graduate seminar on the history of Mexico, Zapatismo, water, and agriculture.