Water Hist (2009) 1:75–77 DOI 10.1007/s12685-009-0004-5 BOOK REVIEW
Notarios y agricultores: Crecimiento y atraso en el campo mexicano, 1780–1920 Alejandro Tortolero Villasen˜or. Me´xico: Siglo XXI Editores; Universidad Auto´noma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa, 2008. Illus., tables, maps, photographs, and notes, 328 pages. ISBN: 978-607-3-00041-3, $180 pesos (soft-cover) Jeff M. Banister Published online: 24 June 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
In 1909, with Mexico on the verge of revolution, a public notary from the central-plateau town of Jilotepec published a book that would deeply influence the tenor and tone of national resource policy in the twentieth century. Andre´s Molina Enrı´quez’s Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales set forth a scathing critique of the hacienda system, faulting its feudalistic tendencies, venal landlords, and labor oppression, among other things, for the countryside’s overall failure to modernize. Molina Enrı´quez went on to help craft Article 27 of Mexico’s 1917 Constitution, a condensation of both liberal and radical agrarian ideals stemming from the revolution, which broke out in 1910. Article 27, along with a raft of enabling legislation, set the stage for the subsequent breakup and redistribution of large landholdings, some of which originated in the colonial period. For years, students of rural Mexico—such esteemed luminaries as Frank Tannenbaum (1929) and Francois Chevalier (1963)—drew inspiration from Los Grandes Problemas, tracing the roots of rural rebellion to the backwardness and abuses of the hacienda system. Over time, official historiography metabolized their analyses, both aggrandizing and reifying the great array of social forces unleashed in 1910 into a set of popular understandings and practices: ‘‘the Revolution.’’ By mid-century, this meta narrative of agrarian revolt had become gospel in government and political circles. ‘‘Los grandes problemas nacionales,’’ writes Nobel laureate Carlos Fuentes, ‘‘even into the fifties was required reading for everyone…in the National Autonomous University’s School of Law’’ (in Tortolero, p. 9). Now, with preparations underway for the revolution’s centennial, historian Alejandro Tortolero has turned Molina Enrı´quez’s basic premises upside down. In Notarios y Agricultores: Crecimiento y atraso en el campo mexicano, 1780–1920, Tortolero argues that agricultural development, rather than the so-called ‘‘backwardness’’ (atraso) alone, explains revolt in rural Mexico. By the late nineteenth century, a rapidly modernizing capitalist agriculture had taken root in central Mexico’s Chalco-Amecameca
J. M. Banister (&) Department of Geography and Regional Development, and the Southwest Center, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA e-mail:
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region, the location of much of Molina Enrı´quez’s original source material. With advances in the areas of property, credit, and irrigation—three of Molina Enrı´quez’s five ‘‘great national problems’’—large landholders and government officials together had secured the region’s position as Mexico City’s ‘‘granary’’ (Chalco) and as the third largest cane sugar producer in the world (Morelos). Yet, modernity had either passed by or actively alienated the large cosmos of indigenous communities, small pueblos, and ranchos situated near Morelos’s large sugar cane ingenios and Chalco’s grain-cultivating haciendas. The new railroads and waterworks failed to reach such places, or worse, simply cut an arrogant swath straight through them. Most towns and villages remained far away from the expanding circuitry of industrial capital, political influence, and paper property rights that characterized Mexico’s privileged poles of development by the late nineteenth century. And yet, they were still swept up in the radical ecological and social transformation that modernity entailed. Tortolero draws from an impressive portmanteau of official and unofficial sources, intensive regional study, and command of a vast and unruly terrain: rural historiography. Travelers’ accounts, landowners’ diaries, and contracts from notary archives allow for the kind of fine-grained analysis that Molina Enrı´quez himself strove for. However, the present study is much more attentive to actual social relations. Molina Enrı´quez, on the other hand, tended toward demagoguery. This attention to social networks leads Tortolero to draw the volume’s freshest conclusion: the so-called ‘‘agrarian thesis’’ of rural revolt is simply too dry. Historians and policymakers for years privileged agrarian over hydraulic factors in their approaches of the countryside. The Zapatistas’ famous clarion call for ‘‘land and liberty’’ perhaps left little room for anything else. Meanwhile, since 1890, the Lago de Chalco—once part of a lush aquatic-ecosystem running like a beaded necklace through the Valley of Mexico—had receded at the hands of hydraulic experts and large landowners. Morelos experienced a similar transformation. In each case, conflict over village and agricultural water supplies and quality proved as, if not more, critical than struggles for land. Indeed, the two remained inextricably linked—a point which scholars have recently begun to appreciate more than ever. Tortolero thus brings his considerable expertise to bear upon the question of how national development ‘‘problems’’ have emerged within the relationship between research and politics. Molina Enrı´quez’s legacy was to influence several generations of policymakers who, in their eagerness to solve ‘‘big national problems,’’ may have overlooked economic development itself as a source of social and economic disparity, the rhetoric of revolution notwithstanding. Post-revolutionary state-led water development, likewise, became the sine qua non of general prosperity, paying far less attention to the pitfalls of centrally managing a resource that creates tensile and idiosyncratic relationships between people and social groups. Still, I find some weaknesses in Tortolero’s argument, shortcomings that might best be understood as directions for future research. Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales became a one-size-fits-all explanation for Mexico’s rural dynamics. Tortolero, similarly, focuses mostly on the Chalco-Amecameca region, while at times leaving the impression that his critique holds for the rest of the countryside as well. Indeed, the book’s very title suggests this to be the case. I suspect, however, that once water becomes centrally integrated into Mexicanist historiography, a far more complex set of social, cultural, and political tableaux will emerge. Water, I believe, introduced into pre- and post-revolutionary politics a fundamental instability, which distinguishes its management from that of land (or, at least, makes their articulation less scrutable). Nonetheless, Notarios y Agricultores, brings
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together the wisdom, insights, and expert archival sleuth work of an accomplished historian. This volume promises to inform the state of the art.
References Chevalier F (1963) Land and society in colonial Mexico: the Great Hacienda (trans: Eustis A). Edited, with a foreword, by Lesley Byrd Simpson, University of California Press, Berkeley Tannenbaum F (1929) The Mexican agrarian revolution. The Macmillan Company, New York
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