Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico - Softcover

"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 * "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 * "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 * "A smart, well-crafted book." -- Casey Walsh * Journal of Interdisciplinary 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 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 * "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 * "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 * "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 * "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 * "[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 *

In Watering the Revolution Mikael D. Wolfe transforms our understanding of Mexican agrarian reform through an environmental and technological history of water management in the emblematic Laguna region. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico and the United States, Wolfe shows how during the long Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) engineers' distribution of water paradoxically undermined land distribution. In so doing, he highlights the intrinsic tension engineers faced between the urgent need for water conservation and the imperative for development during the contentious modernization of the Laguna's existing flood irrigation method into one regulated by high dams, concrete-lined canals, and motorized groundwater pumps. This tension generally resolved in favor of development, which unintentionally diminished and contaminated the water supply while deepening existing rural social inequalities by dividing people into water haves and have-nots, regardless of their access to land. By uncovering the varied motivations behind the Mexican government's decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were ecologically unsustainable, Wolfe tells a cautionary tale of the long-term consequences of short-sighted development policies.