Dam(m/n)ing the Agrarian Reform: The Politics of Irrigation, Public Works, and State Formation in La Laguna, Mexico, 1936–46

This paper examines the little studied “reparto de aguas” (water redistribution) that was integral to the great “reparto de tierras” (land reform) in the leading cotton-producing district of arid north-central Mexico known as “La Laguna” straddling the states of Durango and Coahuila. In 1936, president Lázaro Cárdenas decreed a sweeping land reform that expropriated 220 cotton estates in the region to create new agricultural collectives (“ejidos”) in fulfillment of the promises of the Mexican Revolution as embodied in the 1917 Constitution that mandated distribution and restitution of land to peasants. Using untapped documents from the Historical Water Archive, this paper argues that the long-term viability of the agrarian reform as symbol of Mexican postrevolutionary modernity was undermined not only by a combination of poor planning, corruption, inefficiency and the end of Cárdenas’ term in 1940, as has long been proffered: It also hinged on two contradictory processes in the minds of state engineers-- dam-building and the modernization of centuries-long irrigation practices, both of which engineers internally predicted would likely harm the region’s fragile hydrology. Independently of such accurate predictions, the long delay in building these “indispensable hydraulic complements” to the agrarian reform ultimately made the latter more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a rapidly changing sociopolitical landscape in the 1940s in which agrarian reform was to play a very different role in the national economy than that which was envisioned in the 1930s. Nevertheless, this hydraulic infrastructure was still presented as the technological symbol of Mexican postrevolutionary modernity to land reform beneficiaries in the Laguna desperately awaiting its completion in order to “liberate” them from the vagaries of nature. In the end, Mexican planners adopted the US-financed and supported Green Revolution as the answer to an increasingly eviscerated agrarian reform as land and water resources came under greater stress.