In her study of the environmental, social and political consequences of silver mining in Zacatecas, Rocio Gomez makes resource use a tangible common denominator by which to evaluate the success and failure of the Porfiriato and post-revolutionary era alike. Primarily drawing on correspondence, petitions, reports and laws, Gomez shows how the language of sanitation and development espoused by technocrats and officials was invoked by citizens, farmers and workers in Zacatecas in order to claim the right to access potable water. As a sizeable urban centre in an elevated and remote semi-arid region around 400 miles north-west of Mexico City, this was a paramount issue in Zacatecas and its hinterlands. Yet mine developers and local officials for the most part ignored or dismissed the protests of residents and farmers who objected to the contamination of local water reservoirs by the mining companies. Both before and after the Revolution this response was sanctioned by Mexico City officials, who, despite their embrace of rhetoric around the health and progress of the nation, proved more concerned with immediate profit than the wellbeing of the citizenry.
The first half of the book primarily examines the environmental and social consequences of what Gomez terms an ‘ecology of extraction’ in Zacatecas, as well as its political ramifications. In the first chapter, Gomez examines the significance of mining in Zacatecas from the pre-colonial era until around 1890, showing how it was integral to social and economic development in the area. Yet the disposal of mining effluvia into reservoirs and the spread of waterborne ailments such as cholera caused some local farmers as well as urban residents to legally challenge operators whose practices polluted water supplies, albeit with limited success. With the passage of the Mining Law of 1884, which simplified the mine claim process and encouraged foreign investment, officials in Mexico City as well as some local councilmen successfully curtailed such protests in favour of facilitating investment and uninhibited extraction. In the second chapter, Gomez focuses on Porfirian efforts to control the environment, particularly by providing secure water access to the city, while further expanding the mining industry − goals that often proved contradictory. While there were some improvements, for instance the creation of a sewage system and an aqueduct, the gains remained limited due to both the remoteness of Zacatecas and the unwillingness of officials to jeopardise mining interests.
In the second half of the book, Gomez examines the consequences of local and national laws and policies on a range of actors, including mine operators, farmers and labourers. The third chapter furthers her assessment of the limits of Porfirian sanitation rhetoric by focusing on public health and surveillance. As in Mexico City, public-health campaigns became increasingly prominent in Zacatecas and many had at least a modicum of success, such as slaughterhouse reform and rabies vaccinations. Other issues proved more intractable or were ignored altogether, as officials struggled to impose order in the mining camps and routinely dismissed the dangers of mining itself, even as new industrial mining techniques increased the physical and ecological risks. Gomez then examines legislation and rhetoric on health and water access over the revolutionary period. While public health continued to be a major concern of municipal authorities, new legislation that enshrined potable water as a national right and allowed Zacatecans to mount robust legal challenges against mine operators was in practice often set aside in favour of economic development. Ultimately, the government attempted to resuscitate a tattered economy at the expense of farmers and workers, evoking its predecessor. In the final chapter, Gomez underscores this point by examining the debates around compensation for silicosis during the Cárdenas presidency. State-sanctioned unions advocated for coverage of silicosis as an occupational hazard while mine owners tried to leverage imprecise understandings of the biological links between silicosis and tuberculosis to dismiss respiratory ailments as being unrelated to mine conditions. The government, struggling to fulfil its constitutional duty to protect workers while remaining business-friendly, tended to favour limited compensation for chronic illness over the active prevention demanded by unions and indeed required in some union contracts.
The scope and substance of this book are in many ways impressive, and the prose is clear and effective. While not the focus of her study, the detrimental impacts of mining on forests and cattle are briefly considered, raising intriguing questions about other interrelated hazards of industrial mining that others might endeavour to explore. Gomez herself points to the value of such integration when she describes the visceral image of the blood and offal of cattle, culled due to draught or the collapse of silver prices, flowing into the newly constructed sewage system, to demonstrate the complex ramifications of the mining economy that both funded the sewage system and helped provoke the crises that led to mass slaughter. By examining the causes and consequences of a changing landscape, Gomez provides new perspective on older questions and historiographies. For instance, Zacatecas is treated here as a significant urban hub as well as a resource-rich periphery, making this work a welcome counterpart to the numerous studies of modernity in Mexico City. Its relatively poorer condition poignantly underscores the limits of Porfirian visions of Westernisation, as evidenced by how fountains, built to emulate the ornamental edifices in Mexico City, became sanctioned community wells in Zacatecas due to the lack of reliable access to clean water. She also effectively shows how pre- and post-revolutionary governments alike, despite changes in rhetoric and legislation, sacrificed public health to ensure immediate economic productivity. While she is ultimately more interested in policy and bureaucratic manoeuvring, Gomez also takes pains to include the voices of everyday people even when their efforts proved futile, ensuring that her analysis of technocratic debates remains grounded in lived experience. Overall, Gomez presents a forceful argument for re-examining old narratives with more contemporary modes of analysis, in this case triangulating the rise of the Mexican mining industry with public health and environmental degradation, an approach which allows her to fruitfully intervene in multiple fields of inquiry.
