Two Lands, One Problem

Abstract

In this remarkable first book, Tore Olsson traces the ways in which agricultural and political ambitions, dreams, and ideas flowed back and forth between the American South and Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s. During this period of the “long” New Deal, 1933–1943, progressive and radical thinkers on both sides of the border were able to put their visions of an egalitarian rural and agricultural order into an experimental reality. Not coincidentally, these two places shared quite a few similarities. Both areas were built on plantation agriculture and mono-cropping. Both featured ruinous land tenure arrangements that created simmering rural resentment and revolt. Both created environmental degradation of soil and water, problems that multiplied over generations. Both systems were built on the shaky foundations of class divisions—the planter class and the sharecropper class were the dominant, but wildly unequal, forms of life on the land. And both attracted the attention of liberal and radical politicians and visionaries who saw in them an opportunity—indeed, an invitation—to change the world.