The Laguna region of arid central-northern Mexico has fascinated generations of historians and social scientists. Two major rivers empty into a desert plain, a dramatic combination of environmental opulence and austerity. Just as dramatic are the human efforts to control and benefit from that environment. Even before the western United States was converted into an irrigated emporium of capitalist agriculture, settlers in the Laguna engineered a complicated system of works to channel floodwaters over extensive plains where cotton, the quintessential industrial cash crop, dominated the landscape. The social formation constituted by this industrial agriculture was unstable and volatile, contributing many soldiers to the armies of the Mexican Revolution. After the Revolution, the Laguna became a centerpiece of the state’s developmentalist response to instability—an epic experiment of agrarian reform, studied extensively by anthropologists and sociologists, that included the nationalization of lands and the creation of collective farms.

Wolfe’s book is a...

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