It has been said that in the state of Morelos the Zapatistas won the Mexican Revolution. In the decades following the end of warfare, former Zapatista militants turned lawmakers and headed the transformation of the state from one in which a few sugar-producing haciendas owned and managed most of the land, to one where large tracts of land were organised into many communally owned ejido allotments. Many works have described this transformation and the political conflicts that ensued as municipalities competed for land grants, and how former Zapatistas turned state legislators had to manage personal ambition, loyalty to their home communities, and the political demands of changing federal governments.

In Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos After Zapata, 1920–1940, Salvador Salinas tells the story in a new way, by seeing the redistribution of resources not only as land ownership, but also as access to the environmental resources that are necessary for working the land, especially water. In this way, the book provides a new perspective on post-revolutionary Morelos, and one that is timely right now, when we are becoming increasingly aware of the crucial importance of environmental resources and their management and conservation.

The introduction sets the stage of the argument and conducts a brief review of the literature about post-revolutionary agrarian issues in Morelos. Chapter 1 describes the political developments in Morelos from 1920 to 1940, focusing on the role of the pueblos in the agrarian transformation and how some pueblos benefited from alliances with politicians at the state level, while others sought support at the federal level, when they felt abused by state-level authorities. Chapter 2 describes how the transformation affected natural resources in northern Morelos, where increased charcoal production led to widespread deforestation, which in turn threatened the water supply in the valleys. Here Salinas argues that the federal government played an important role in promoting the conservation of forests with the 1926 Forestry Code, and in some cases by promoting ecologically sustainable forms of pueblo livelihoods, such as early eco-tourism in national parks like Zempoala and the Tepozteco in the 1930s. Chapter 3 turns to water management in the valleys, where the irrigation systems that had been put in place by the haciendas suffered serious deterioration during and after the Revolution. Salinas argues that the competition for water and the neglect of the irrigation systems led to significant waste of this vital resource, as solutions to water management were made locally. In some cases, mounting water conflicts even required the intervention of federal troops. Salinas convincingly argues that water management proved just as formidable a challenge for post-revolutionary agrarianism as did land reform. Chapter 4 describes the turn towards production of rice as a cash crop. Salinas argues that contrary to earlier arguments that have seen the turn towards rice production as having been forced by political pressures to do so, in fact it was the pueblos themselves who chose this way because of the high rice prices. But while riziculture (rice-growing) strongly supported the economic development of the valley pueblos, it also exacerbated the challenges of water management and introduced new public-health threats such as malaria. Chapter 5 illustrates the complex politics of latter-day Zapatismo by describing the 1934 uprising of the former Zapatist Enrique Rodríguez, known as El Tallarín (‘The Noodle’). Salinas describes Rodríguez's rebellion as a result of the breakdown in the alliance between the federal government and the Morelos peasantry, after land redistribution ended in 1929. After roaming the Morelos countryside for a few years, striking fear into the hearts of schoolteachers and tax collectors, Rodríguez finally surrendered to the state governor, another former Zapatista and Rodríguez's own cousin.

The focus on water and sustainability makes Salinas’ book a truly valuable contribution to studies of post-revolutionary Morelos. It provides welcome historical perspective on a topic that is still highly relevant in Morelos, and which still fuels political conflicts in the Morelos pueblos today.

In terms of writing style, it is relatively dry and stays quite close to the historical sources, most of them from the major agrarian archives. These sources tend to provide a fairly administrative bird's-eye view of developments in the state. Engagement with sources in municipal archives in Morelos could perhaps have brought us closer to the local perspectives and to the everyday lives of peasants and municipal administrators. Long passages are list-like descriptions of political events with little work done to put the events into broader contexts or to tease out meaning from them. The book is at its best when it explicitly puts local events in the different pueblos into the broader context of national and state politics, demonstrating the tensions between pueblo resource needs and federal resource-management policies. The underlying theoretical argument about focusing not only on land but also on resources and sustainability is definitely welcome, but the book is really more descriptive than theoretical. The chapters on early rice production in Morelos and on the Tallarín uprising do fill a gap in the literature about this period. And while the chapter on rice production is directly relevant for the theme of water and sustainability, it is less clear how the chapter on the Tallarín uprising relates to the book's larger theme and argument. Rodríguez did not seem to be fighting for land or water, but, as Salinas argues, rather was inspired by the Cristeros in defence of conservative pueblo cultural values and against anti-clerical Cárdenista socialism.

The book will find a core audience among the increasing number of scholars of environmental history, but it also ought to be read by Mexicanist scholars with a general interest in the period.