Who controls access to water remains a deeply contentious issue across the world. From legal questions originating in the mid to late nineteenth century to the political impact of the Mexican Revolution and postrevolutionary period, Mikael D. Wolfe examines the historical context of this subject in Mexico. Wolfe focuses on how the Mexican state made sense of water rights and regulated access, particularly in the rich agricultural zone known as the Comarca Lagunera in the northern states of Durango and Coahuila. The scope and historical range is impressive. It is a narrative understood through the perspectives of engineers, bureaucratic officials, national and regional elites, community leaders, and private investors as they debated and contested technological interventions in the natural environment.
Wolfe notes that in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century reformers like the civil engineer Miguel Ángel Quevedo convinced national leaders across the political spectrum, from classic liberals to revolutionaries, of the importance of progressive laws for water management. It was a principle enshrined in Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. However, as Wolfe shows over the course of this history, implementation was grossly inadequate and often stymied by political infighting and the lack of a coherent vision. For example, by the 1930s, under the left-leaning government of President Lázaro Cárdenas, millions of acres of land were distributed to peasant farmers but a program to ensure that these parcels were properly irrigated remained elusive. This problem worsened under subsequent administrations eager to use water issues as a political bargaining chip.
Wolfe focuses the historical narrative around the ways in which the Díaz regime (1876–1911) and the revolutionary and postrevolutionary governments that followed contended with access to water. Central to his work is the story of dam-building on the Nazas River in Coahuila and Durango. He extends this analysis well into the twentieth century and concludes with an epilogue that brings this history to the present day. Recent presidential administrations have continued to grapple with these concerns. Ultimately, Wolfe finds that the formidable challenges of ensuring that the region's productive agricultural lands were adequately watered forced ambitious politicians and trained engineers to confront hard realities. Ignoring environmental circumstances in order to carry out politically popular irrigation projects for short-term economic goals led to serious consequences with long-term costs for the regional ecosystem and way of life. In the Comarca Lagunera, this meant that by the early 1960s decades of a water regime focused on surface collection and damning rivers had severely strained regional aquifers.
The history of water has long been a subject of interest for scholars of Mexico. Wolfe builds on pioneering studies by Luis Aboites and engages more recent histories by Christopher Boyer and Emily Wakild, among others. One of the chief contributions of his book to this broader historiography is its diverse use of sources from national, state, and local archives in Mexico alongside foreign collections, including documents in the Rockefeller Foundation Archive. By combining this wide cache of sources, Wolfe's history moves deftly across regional, national, and bilateral concerns related to water management. He also connects his research to global scholarship on water, especially Timothy Mitchell's work on the Nile River.
In doing so, he draws on the idea of “envirotech” pioneered by historians and anthropologists of the United States and Europe to emphasize the importance of studying technology and the environment together. Wolfe sees this framework as essential to understanding the full significance of large-scale human interventions into nature like the hydrological projects along the Nazas River. He encourages scholars of Mexico and Latin America to combine research on environmental history with the history of technology to write new envirotech histories of the region. It is an intriguing offer.
