A Land Between Waters

Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico

Edited by Christopher R. Boyer

SERIES:

The University of Arizona Press

Mexico is one of the most ecologically diverse nations on the planet, with landscapes that range from rainforests to deserts and from small villages to the continent’s largest metropolis. Yet historians are only beginning to understand how people’s use of the land, extraction of its resources, and attempts to conserve it have shaped both the landscape and its inhabitants.

A Land Between Waters explores the relationship between the people and the environment in Mexico. It heralds the arrival of environmental history as a major area of study within the field of Mexican history. This volume brings together a dozen original works of environmental history by some of the foremost experts in Mexican environmental history from both the United States and Mexico.

The contributions collected in this seminal volume explore a wide array of topics, from the era of independence to the present day. Together they examine how humans have used, abused, and attended to nature in Mexico over more than two hundred years. Written in clear, accessible prose, A Land Between Waters showcases the breadth of Mexican environmental history in a way that defines the key topics in the field and suggests avenues for subsequent work. Most importantly, it assesses the impacts of environmental changes that Mexico has faced in the past with an eye to informing national debates about the challenges that the nation will face in the future.

A diverse collection of case studies on human-environment interactions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico that should be of broad interest to environmental historians, historical geographers, and specialists on Mexico alike.’—Journal of Historical Geography

‘A Land Between Waters is most compelling in its explicit attempt to cross divides. . . . It offers a model for working across barriers of region, language, methodology, and conceptual focus rather than within them.’—Historical Geography

‘A landmark study . . . [that] will set a standard for studies in Mexican environmental history and serve as a point of departure for further studies.’—Evan Ward, author of Border Oasis: Water and the Political Ecology of the Colorado River Delta, 1940-1975

Christopher R. Boyer is an associate professor of history and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920–1935.

Acknowledgments
1. The Cycles of Mexican Environmental History
Christopher R. Boyer
2. Downslope and North: How Soil Degradation and 22 Synthetic Pesticides Drove the Trajectory of Mexican Agriculture through the Twentieth Century
Angus Wright
3. Mexico’s Breadbasket: Agriculture and the Environment in the Bajío
Martín Sánchez Rodríguez
4. Nature as Subject and Citizen in the Mexican Botanical Garden, 1787–1829
Rick A. López
5. Besieged Forests at Century’s End: Industry, Speculation, and Dispossession in Tlaxcala’s La Malintzin Woodlands, 1860–1910
José Juan Juárez Flores
6. Water and Revolution in Morelos, 1850–1915
Alejandro Tortolero Villaseñor
7. King Henequen: Order, Progress, and Ecological Change in Yucatán, 1850–1950
Sterling Evans
8. Class and Nature in the Oil Industry of Northern Veracruz, 1900–1938
Myrna I. Santiago
9. Parables of Chapultepec: Urban Parks, National Landscapes, and Contradictory Conservation in Modern Mexico
Emily Wakild
10. The Illusion of National Power: Water Infrastructure in Mexican Cities, 1930–1990
Luis Aboites Aguilar
11. Episodes of Environmental History in the Gulf of California: Fisheries, Commerce, and Aquaculture of Nacre and Pearls
Mario Monteforte and Micheline Cariño
12. Conclusion: Of the “Lands in Between” and the Environments of Modernity
Cynthia Radding
About the Contributors
Index

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