Displacement or Colonization? Hydraulic Development and Resettlement in the Mexican Tropics

The movement of people from country to city on an unprecedented scale is an oft-cited fact of the twentieth century. In Mexico, such migration was both the cause and consequence of marked social, economic, political, and cultural shifts that gained momentum in the decades following World War II. While many dislocations were unplanned consequences of capitalist expansion, state-directed relocations were often part and parcel of modernization schemes, some of which encouraged migrations not to the city but to the countryside. This paper examines one such scheme in southern Mexico, in which a state-directed regional development project included a plan to colonize the tropics. The construction of a massive hydroelectric dam in the Papaloapan River Basin forced some twenty-thousand indigenous residents to relocate to planned communities in the region, alongside irrigated settler colonies for Mexicans hailing from other corners of the country. This paper explores the environmental, juridical, and political transformations among colonists, both forced and voluntary, revealing the multivalent and divergent plans and paths of regional development in the mid-twentieth century