Read an Excerpt
Watering the Revolution
An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico
By Mikael D. Wolfe Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7306-3
CHAPTER 1
River of Revolution
¡Ni un verdecido alcor, ni una pradera!
Tan sólo miro, de mi vista enfrente,
la llanura sin fin, seca y ardiente
donde jamás reinó la primavera.
Rueda el río monótono en la austera
cuenca, sin un cantil ni una rompiente
y, al ras del horizonte, el sol poniente,
cual la boca de un horno, reverbera.
Y en esta gama gris que no abrillanta
ningún color; aquí, do el aire azota
con ígneo soplo la reseca planta,
sólo, al romper su cárcel, la bellota
en el pajizo algodonal levanta
de su cándido airón la blanca nota.
[Neither a verdant hill nor a field
I simply look, the view in front of me,
at the endless plains, dry and very hot
Where spring never reigned.
The river rolls monotonous in the austere
bed, with neither a cliff nor a shoal
and at the edge of the horizon, the setting sun
Hovers, like at the mouth of an oven.
And in the gray array there glows
not a single color; here, where the air whips
with a burning breeze the desiccated plant
only the acorn, upon breaking free of its prison,
amidst the cottony hay raises
The white note from its candid crest.]
MANUEL JOSÉ OTHÓN, "Una estapa del Nazas" (Steppe of the Nazas)
Francisco I. Madero wondered why his fellow riverine landowners were so indifferent to what he believed were the obvious benefits of building a high dam on the unwieldy Nazas. He had convinced the ten most prominent of them, both upriver and downriver, to meet on November 20, 1906 — exactly four years to the day before he would call for a national revolution to overthrow the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz by force of arms — to discuss the "transcendent" matter. He had even published an announcement as a reminder one month before the event. Yet when the day came, only a few attended, and among the absent majority only one had the courtesy to excuse himself. Madero provided an explanation for this failure of a meeting: although he "hated to say it," a "ridiculous egoism" and "extreme apathy" reigned among Laguneros. As Madero saw it, this culture of selfishness and pride was so endemic that large landowners could not even agree to form an agricultural chamber to lobby for their common interests and prevent textile producers in Mexico's central cities from unilaterally lowering the price of raw cotton. The "white note" rising from its irrigated land — as Manuel José Othón described it in his famous poem — cotton was the Laguna's chief crop, and with the advent of the railroad in the 1880s, the region became the nation's leading domestic producer of raw cotton. To add insult to injury, when the meeting convened Madero remarked that the few Laguneros who had bothered to appear "wanted to sell the bear's skin before having killed it" (or "to count their chickens before they hatched"). In short, they accomplished nothing except an anemic agreement to form a committee that would revisit the matter at a later, unspecified, time.
Madero persevered after the failed meeting. Drawing on both his own training in agronomy in the United States and France and his considerable experience as a Laguna riverine farmer, he closely studied earlier surveys of the river. From 1901 to 1903, as part of the Nazas River Inspection Commission, federal engineers had completed preliminary technical and reconnaissance studies for a dam on the river. Díaz had established this commission, financed by users and managed by federal engineers, in 1891 to design federally enforceable regulations for distributing the Nazas waters in conformity with the first-ever federal water law passed in 1888. Shortly thereafter, federal engineers began recording flow volumes and within a few years examined the feasibility of building a storage dam in the Fernández Canyon just southwest of the Laguna's principal city, Torreón. They hoped that such a dam would facilitate more equitable distribution of water and resolve the perennial conflicts between upriver and downriver users over limited and uneven allocation.
In 1907, Madero self-published a study of his own, drawn extensively from the earlier federal studies, in which he sought to persuade his fellow Laguneros of how advantageous damming the Nazas would be. In his study, Madero challenged his fellow Laguneros to imagine how much their region would augment its wealth if the Nazas were dammed: "[After all,] if with this currently defective [river] regime so much capital has been raised leading to such a fast developmental boom of cities such as Torreón, which only fifteen years ago was a miserable village and now is one of the principal cities in the border states — how great it will be when the better use of the Nazas waters increases annual production to its maximum and our farms and ranches triple or quadruple in value?"
Madero's glowing assessment of the engineers' studies was partial and selective, however. Although he tried to reassure riverine landowners that there was nothing to fear and everything to gain from the dam, he did not reveal — or, perhaps, was unaware of — the concerns of the Nazas River Inspection Commission engineers about building a dam in the Fernández Canyon. Therein lay the irony of Madero's proposal: although Laguneros relied on a "defective" river, they had already developed Mexico's most technologically advanced irrigated agriculture reliant on the river. Indeed, the Laguna boasted a dense, intricate, and vast network of small diversion dams, canals, secondary canals, and acequias (irrigation ditches) that channeled the river's flow to highly fertile lands. Laguna farmers and their tenacious laborers had tapped into the transformative force of the free-flowing torrential Nazas current with a combination of labor, technology, and capital to create one of Mexico's most prosperous agricultural regions. Yet the Nazas delivered water seasonally and, occasionally ruinously — hence, landowners' relationship to the river was tense and unstable; it defied their desire for predictability. Madero would strive, as he saw it, to rectify that deficiency.
Region of Lakes
The Laguna, short for "La Comarca de la Laguna" (the region of the lake) or "La Comarca Lagunera" (region of lakes), is a large arid and semi-arid, roughly rectangular zone that occupies significant portions of northeastern Durango and southwestern Coahuila. Its soil is generally of sedimentary origin from millennia-long accumulation of mud, gravel, and sands arriving with the torrential flows of the Nazas and Aguanaval rivers in a great valley surrounded in all directions by small mountain ranges, or sierras.
Other Mexican rivers drain into the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico but not the Nazas and Aguanaval. The average yearly regional rainfall is a scant 20 centimeters, and most of the rain arrives between June and September in irregular intervals; these two highly variable currents created sporadic lakes millennia ago as the seasons alternated between dry and wet. These lakes might remain intermittently but more often evaporated or filtered underground to recharge the region's aquifers. Until the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the region's regularly visible and identifiable lakes were those of Mayrán in the east and northeast, Tlahualilo in the northwest, Laguna Seca in the south, and Laguna del Álamo (present-day Viesca) in the southeast. Where they did not pool, the rivers formed divergent, and frequently shifting, branches or offshoots known as derramaderos (wash or dry stream beds) that constituted vegas (fertile lowlands).
Together, the Nazas and the Aguanaval rivers currently drain a watershed that nourishes an enormous expanse of nearly five million hectares of alluvial soil. Topographically, this expanse has the peculiarity of being extraordinarily flat, with minimal sloping toward the north or west. It has given the Nazas flow a northeasterly direction after it meanders down from its origin at the confluence of the Oros and Ramos rivers in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Durango. Since the founding of Mexico's modern state boundaries in the 1820s and 1830s, the Nazas has flowed through Durango State (considered the "upriver region") before reaching Coahuila State (the "downriver region"). It then serves as a rough north-south boundary between the two states for about fifty kilometers before veering east entirely into Coahuila and draining into the Laguna de Mayrán.
Rain and temperature heavily influenced the character of life in the Laguna, as it still does to this day. During the dry season, primarily the winter months from November to February, temperatures average in the teens Celsius during the day and fall a little below zero at night, while in the wet season, primarily during the summer months from May to September, average temperatures reach 37 degrees Celsius or higher during the day, with comfortable lows in the teens at night. Between these extremes, nestled among river-fed lakes, native grasses, rush, and ditch reed (carrizo) once offered refuge for brown and white herons, as well as ducks, killdeer birds (tildíos), and many others that would enliven their surroundings with their song. The lakes were richly populated with fish, especially the matalote (a ray-finned freshwater fish), bagre (catfish), sardines, and trout, all important protein sources for local native peoples. Indeed, the name "Nasas" for the region's principal river, later changed to Nazas, signified an implement — a kind of net — for catching and storing fish.
At present, ecologists classify the Laguna as part of the Mapimí ecoregion, a large endorheic basin characterized by closed-basin streams and spring environments. Isolated and insular, therefore, the region's streams feed an environment that has a relative paucity of species but high endemism; of the region's twenty-six fish species, for instance, thirteen are found nowhere else. Yet as striking as this insularity appears, it may not have always been the case. According to a recent hydrogeological study of the nearby Cuatro Ciénegas region, in north-central Coahuila, designated a United Nations World Biosphere area for its naturally occurring (and endangered) crystal blue wells and ponds in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert, the system of lakes and their connection to the Nazas River flow may in prehistoric times have constituted part of a far larger hydroecological region encompassing a broad swath of the present-day Mexican north. The study's authors surmise that below ground, an enormous regional aquifer system "may have linked the Río Nazas and Aguanaval of the Sierra Madre Occidental to the Río Grande via the Cuatro Ciénegas Closed Basin and other large, currently dry, upgradient lakes." They hypothesize that this system once formed a large catchment of groundwater wholly or partially occupying some 91,000 square kilometers across five northern states (Coahuila, Durango, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, and Nuevo León). Meanwhile, above ground, over this enormous area "an extensive lake system may have existed connecting the Nazas, Cuatro Ciénegas and the Río Grande (through its tributary the Río Salado) until the late Holocene [about ten thousand years ago], when either regional climatic drying or uplift in the eastern Sierra Madre Oriental severed the connection."
Recent ecological and scientific investigations reinforce a fact clearly indicated by colonial accounts and maps that date as far back as Spanish colonization and penetration of the northern frontier in the late sixteenth century and carry through to independence in the early nineteenth century (see figure 1.1): the Laguna's historical ecology had always been dynamic. As early as 1787, Dionisio Gutiérrez, a historian and secular parish priest of the Hispano-Tlaxcalan pueblo of Parras, the Laguna's economic and cultural center at the time, remarked that the Nazas had various branches that sometimes drained in one area and sometimes in another.
After independence, the Mexican state gradually began compiling more precise geographical and scientific data throughout the country. Even with the more precise data, the direction of the Nazas River's flow and the locations of the corresponding lagoons it fed were a source of confusion until the late nineteenth century. The Nazas had two principal branches once it reached the present-day interstate boundary between Durango and Coahuila: one flowed north to the Tlahualilo basin in Durango, and the other flowed east to the Laguna de Mayrán in Coahuila. The former's flow progressively decreased before it ceased altogether sometime between 1829 and 1845. This natural phenomenon, typical of torrential rivers like the Nazas, left the erroneous impression that the river had completely shifted course from north to east rather than having momentarily (in geological time) extinguished one of its two principal branches. Despite their frustrations with the river's irregular flow, Laguneros appreciated its effects on the soil. Parras, where Gutiérrez lived, drew its name from the prosperous viticulture that made it the colonial Laguna's principal town. He observed there that "with water all types of grains, vegetables, cotton and flax are produced with good results."
Similarly, in his famous account of his visit to New Spain in 1803–4, Alexander von Humboldt, wrote optimistically about the potential for cotton production in the soon-to-be-independent Spanish colony. He noted that in 1791, New Spain exported six times more cotton than the United States. By 1800, these figures had changed dramatically. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin (short for "engine") in 1793 and its subsequent adoption eliminated the constraints formerly imposed by the need for manual separation of seed and lint. The United States surged ahead with a 2,300 percent increase in raw cotton production. By 1810, that had increased by 6,000 percent. Widespread diffusion of the cotton gin contributed significantly to the social and economic transformation of cotton production by revitalizing slavery in the southern United States. The deployment of this new technology enabled supply not only to satisfy but also to significantly increase demand in the early stages of the transatlantic Industrial Revolution. Predicting that New Spain would eventually catch up, Humboldt remarked: "When we consider the physical positions of the United States and Mexico, we can hardly entertain a doubt that these two countries will one day be enabled to produce all the cotton employed in the manufactures of Europe." Among the northern regions of New Spain that Humboldt identified as particularly promising was the intendancy of Durango, in which the Laguna was located. He anticipated that northern Mexico could "one day rival Galicia and the Asturias in the production of flax."
The Origins of Mexico's White Gold in the Laguna
Etymologically, the English word "cotton" derives from the old French coton, a modification of the Arabic kutn originating from Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin and the source of the Spanish algodón. Cotton is the fruit of the plant that produces the fiber so valued for making textiles. Before describing its cultivation in the late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Laguna using the flood-farming irrigation method known as aniego, I offer a brief historical overview of the cotton plant's morphology, botany, and geographical lineage that demonstrates cotton's global importance.
Recent DNA analyses suggest that the Gossypium cotton genus diverged from its closest relatives 10–15 million years ago during the Miocene geological epoch to originate as a distinct species 5 million–10 million years ago. Three principal centers of diversity developed during the early evolution of Gossypium: Australia, northeast Africa and Arabia, and west-central and southern Mexico. Since the agricultural revolution began some ten thousand years ago, humans have grown cotton in all these world regions. It was the species Gossypium hirsutum that originated in Mesoamerica, however, that would come to dominate world cotton cultivation and provide more than 90 percent of the world's annual cotton crop in more than forty countries by the late twentieth century. New World genomes include the largest number of cotton species in the world — eighteen — compared with a total of forty-nine for all other regions combined. Overall, New World species are "agronomically superior," according to leading experts on the crop, and most of the modern Gossypium hirsutum cultivars are based on the upland variety developed in the southern United States from the introduction of the Mexican highland stock in 1806.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Watering the Revolution by Mikael D. Wolfe. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
