Pacifying a Rebellious Waterscape: Climate, Technology, and Revolution in La Laguna, Mexico, 1907–27

This paper examines the intersection of variable river flow, the deployment of hydraulic technology, revolution and postrevolutionary pacification in the north central Laguna region of Mexico from 1907 to 1927.  Mexico's leading region of irrigated cotton cultivation dependent on migrant labor, the Laguna was a cauldron of rebellion during the Mexican Revolution, supplying thousands of recruits for Pancho Villa’s División del Norte. Building on William K. Meyers' work showing the correlation between the ebbs and flows of the Laguna's Nazas River and the shifting fortunes of Villa's short-lived occupation (1914-1915) of the region, the paper carries the story into the 1920s, when the federal government looked to groundwater pumping technology and dam-building as means of stabilizing the rural labor force and preventing the kind of social unrest that helped precipitate Revolution. The paper draws on archival sources, engineering journals, local and national newspapers and a growing historiography on environment and technology to analyze more closely the important but understudied interconnections between social, political, environmental and technological processes in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico.