Salvador Salinas. Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos after Zapata, 1920-1940. Latin American Landscapes Series. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. 272 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8165-3720-4.
Reviewed by Casey Walsh (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2019)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
The Mexican Revolution is an icon of popular political culture that has shaped the imagination and actions of subsequent generations as they confront enduring issues of power, national identity, social inequality, and justice. It is an event that defines how Mexico's history is written for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues to attract the attention of scholars interested in questions of mass mobilization, social change, the development of capitalism, and state formation. Nowhere is this more true than in the state of Morelos, where Emiliano Zapata rallied peasants to arms with calls to recover village lands and political sovereignty. Memories of Zapata, and Zapatismo, continue to thrive and animate projects throughout Mexico into the twenty-first century.
Salvador Salinas has given us a book that offers new insights on the topic of peasant politics in Morelos after the revolution. In Land, Liberty and Water: Morelos after Zapata, 1920-1940, Salinas constructs a fine-grained regional history that contributes to longstanding discussions of rural production, rebellion, and postrevolutionary state formation by exploring the importance of natural resources and population dynamics to this story. The nuanced discussion of water management, rice cultivation, and charcoal production makes this book a valuable addition to the expanding literature on environmental history in Latin America. Chapter 1, "Pueblo Politics," reviews the dynamic power relationship between local, state, and national actors from Álvaro Obregon to Lázaro Cárdenas. Salinas argues that the action of the pueblos to contest the power of regional elite who were encrusted in the political apparatus of the state of Morelos led to both a reassertion of local sovereignty and the strengthening of the federal government. This is why 1938 could mark the "apogee of pueblo power in Morelos politics and the consummation of the agrarian reform" (p. 48). In addition to providing a concise recap of regional political history, this chapter is a smart and nuanced reminder that in the messy process of state formation, political centralization and decentralization are neither necessarily opposed nor mutually exclusive.
In chapter 2, "Fields and Forests," Salinas provides a wealth of evidence of how pueblos "actively used the agrarian bureaucracy to engage the state" in ways that benefited them (p. 53). Some pueblos stood firm on their millennial claims to land restitutions, while other more recently formed towns had no qualms with recognizing the nation-state's right to own and allocate land to them. An interesting dimension of this negotiation of rule was the struggle between municipal governments, often controlled by powerful landowners, and the ejidal committees that were formed by smallholders and ex-militants. Salinas traces an environmental history of Morelos through this struggle, as the two political instances also fought over forest resources, such as wood and charcoal, with the ejidal committees controlling the forests and enabling heavy local use for charcoal until the late 1930s, despite the federal Forestry Code of 1926. At the same time, the book presents data on the rapid population growth that generated social and economic tensions in the pueblos of Morelos between 1921 and 1940. This information about the growth of old and new settlements in Morelos, and the role of migration from the state of Guerrero in this growth, is fascinating and points to a much more dynamic rural social field than is often portrayed by scholars studying peasants and Zapatismo in Morelos.
The environment continues its protagonism in chapters 3 and 4, as Salinas traces the virtually unexplored but very revealing history of irrigated rice agriculture in Morelos. Chapter 3 focuses on water and in particular the federal "Juntas de Agua" that were created to fill the void previously exercised by the region's haciendas in building, maintaining, and operating irrigation infrastructure and managing water resources in Morelos. Salinas shows us that with water, as with land, pueblos made strategic use of national institutions as they vied with neighbors for the liquid needed to water their rice fields. The Juntas made plenty of enemies in municipal governments and ejidal committees through their efforts to coordinate river-basin-wide water allocations and the exaction of taxes. The federal government even took the extreme measure of deploying soldiers to back up these actions, which motivated pueblos to turn to the governors of Morelos to set up alternate plans for managing water.
All of this allows Salinas to continue to refine the discussion of centralization and state formation after Zapata, but perhaps the more interesting part of this story has to do with rice agriculture and the way that rice flourished in the Morelos countryside as a more decentralized regime of production than the industrial sugar plantations that had dominated the landscape previously. Standing water in rice fields throughout Morelos was habitat for mosquitos, and Salinas connects the rise of malaria outbreaks and public health campaigns to the commodity. Many aspects of this political economy of rice remain to be developed further, such as how the numerous small household-controlled parcels created through agrarian reform were so much better suited to rice than sugar or how growing rice at the household level favored domestic labor arrangements characteristic of peasant society more than wage labor in the model of industrial capitalist agriculture.
Chapter 5 tells a story of how the transformation of the Morelos landscape after Zapata through decentralized charcoal and rice production set the conditions for the rebellion of Enrique "El Tallarin" Rodríguez. This is one of the less-studied uprisings that broke out in rural Mexico in the 1920s and '30s but one that Salinas deftly uses to highlight the environmental dimensions of postrevolutionary state formation. El Tallarin and his followers were motivated by Catholic faith and a distrust of what they perceived as the anticlerical socialism of the federal government's public education system, which folds this uprising into the larger "cristiada" that flared throughout Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Crucially, however, they were born of Zapatismo, and Salinas reveals the political and environmental dimensions of this rejection of the state as the rebels fought against the corruption and "the growing influence of centralized government in pueblo life" and struggled for control over local resources, such as forests (p. 162).
Land, Liberty, and Water concludes briefly with a reminder that the Morelos countryside was complicated and diverse and a quick review of literature on state formation and the environment in Latin America. In this short conclusion, the fascinating connections between environment, economy, and politics that make this book so interesting—between population growth, the demise of sugar production, the rise of rice and charcoal production, the changing management of water, and rural revolt—fade from view. Regardless, throughout the body of the text, Salinas presents careful, solid research that throws new light on the political ecology of the Mexican Revolution and its long demobilization. This work will surely inspire more research in Morelos on shifting patterns of sugar and rice production, on the role of charcoal and other forest products in the livelihoods of rural dwellers, on migration, and on the ways people involved in regional economies and environments throughout Mexico responded to the decentralizing and recentralizing forces of the revolution.
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Citation:
Casey Walsh. Review of Salinas, Salvador, Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos after Zapata, 1920-1940.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53856
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