A Land between Waters offers important interventions into the environmental history of Mexico. The book provides an introduction by Christopher Boyer and a conclusion by Cynthia Radding that bracket ten chapters on specific topics ranging from agriculture and water management to botanical gardens and urban park conservation. These essays from scholars based in both Mexico and the United States showcase a variety of more traditional and fresh topics that focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and many of the chapters extend back much further for deeper historical context.
The chapters cover many topics that I would organise into four principal categories: land and water use; economy and natural resource extraction; natural history; and urban issues. In the first category, Angus Wright analyses soil depletion as a result of shifting agricultural practices and pesticide use, though he contextualises his essay by looking back across many centuries to the pre-Columbian period. Martín Sánchez Rodríguez shows how changing water management strategies in the nineteenth-century Bajío region accounted for some of the most significant developments in agriculture, but that these also had critical environmental impacts as landowners altered waterways with dams, levees and cajas de agua. Alejandro Tortolero Villaseñor also examines water, offering a ‘hydraulic thesis’ to show how, rather than the traditional emphasis on Emiliano Zapata's famous cry for ‘Land and Liberty’, the real basis of conflict in Morelos leading to the Mexican Revolution revolved around access to water for sugar haciendas.
A second category of essays in the volume investigates economic forces and natural resource extraction. José Juan Juárez Flores studies how forest products (such as broom root from palms and turpentine from pine resin) became commodities in the late nineteenth century, with dire consequences for trees, soil and people on the central Mexican plateau. Sterling Evans examines the ecological effects of henequen production and exports from the Yucatan between about 1850 and 1950. He reveals how producers of the crop for twine in the United States were able to overcome the seemingly hostile and barren landscape but also devastated the flora, fauna and soils. Once the industry declined and the haciendas were abandoned, however, the native ecology reappeared, Evans concludes. Focusing her chapter on oil extraction in Veracruz, Myrna Santiago demonstrates how human–environment relations in the oil industry depended on class and job type, and shows that various social groups – through their labour – both affected the environment and developed relationships with their physical surroundings, often based on their class position, their work and their struggle within the oil extraction business. Mario Monteforte and Micheline Cariño analyse the quest for oyster pearls in the Gulf of California, illustrating a transformation of the resource from a local food and ornament to a global commodity to, most recently, pearl farming that protects oysters in the Gulf.
A third category in the book is represented by just one essay but nonetheless indicates an important area of consideration for environmental historians: natural history and the link between the history of science and environmental history. Rick López writes about the Mexican Botanical Garden, from its late-eighteenth-century formation by the Spanish colonial government to the mid-nineteenth century. López suggests the Botanical Garden was a tool for colonial and national governments that also shaped knowledge about and perceptions of nature.
The fourth category of essays in the volume analyses urban issues. Emily Wakild examines the cherished and much-visited Chapultepec Park in Mexico City to show how conservation of an urban space and interactions with nature in the city occurred in tandem with the forces of urbanisation and development, thereby revealing critical views of both conservation and landscapes. Luis Aboites Aguilar traces the evolution of drinking water and sewage infrastructure in Mexican cities, explaining how these new services reduced health risks but altered environmental conditions in surrounding areas and in subsoil aquifers. Cynthia Radding's conclusion at the end of the book primarily provides excellent summaries of all the chapters; it might therefore be worth reading the conclusion straight after the introduction, because it provides such good context for the book.
The various chapters highlight some new approaches and topics in Mexican environmental history. Discussion of the history of science, health, urban areas and labour deepens and expands the historiography because these themes are insufficiently addressed in existing scholarship. The focus on water in several chapters shows how this issue is generating increasing attention, and A Land between Waters examines water in several different ways: urban water services, irrigation and hydraulic conflicts leading to social conflict in 1910, for example.
While this book delves fruitfully into Mexican environmental history and explores intriguing topics, the theoretical contributions are more difficult to extract, and more dialogue with a broader body of scholarship would have expanded the appeal of the volume. The book contains few scholarly discussions or academic debates about environmental history. In some cases, though – such as Tortolero Villaseñor's hydraulic thesis about Morelos and the Mexican Revolution – the research and arguments presented can actually help to provide a rethinking of the historiography and thereby enhance the book's broader appeal. Wakild provides a broader claim about environmental history, stating that parks in Mexico and throughout Latin America followed a more developmental trajectory than those in, say, the United States. Such an assertion offers a larger argument for other scholars within and beyond Mexico to engage with. Boyer's introduction mentions some of these larger contributions, such as a historical arc from centralisation to decentralisation since the late colonial period, which is not addressed in all the chapters but provides an excellent starting point and broader claim for scholars to grapple with in the future; a departure from declensionist narratives, which is important and effectively accomplished in some essays; and a rethinking of periodisation in Mexican history, though the chapters themselves generally revolve around the typical watershed events – independence, the Porfiriato, the Mexican Revolution, Cárdenas, the Green Revolution, neoliberalism. Overall, the book covers many fascinating topics and provides new insights that will benefit readers and, I hope, inspire future scholars to analyse, discuss, debate and expand environmental history.
