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Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside
In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. Agrarian Crossings tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border.
Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, Tore Olsson shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. He traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, he describes how Roosevelt's New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. Olsson also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation's "green revolution" in Mexico--which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century--and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II.
Rather than a comparative history, Agrarian Crossings is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.
Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, Tore Olsson shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. He traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, he describes how Roosevelt's New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. Olsson also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation's "green revolution" in Mexico--which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century--and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II.
Rather than a comparative history, Agrarian Crossings is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.
- GenresHistory
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 2, 2017
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June 25, 2023
This is one of the best book of its kind.
Olsson clearly shows how the New Deal and Cardeniste Mexico shape each other policy but with Henry A. Wallace losing in the Democrat Party election and Alemán as the successor Mexico president, the shifting policy would change the two nations course history and the world as a whole. First, this would change how Green Revolution would take place, first as more peasant-friendly plant breeding, as the Rockefeller agricultural program in Mexico had initially been for supporting peculiar postrevolutionary Mexico, and later as Borlaug's wheat program state promotion and subsidization of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizer, and pesticide across the nation.
This book clearly shows how agricultural debates its not about science vs politics, but about what kind of politic support what type of science. And we see, as the Cold War escalates the United States exported Green Revolution to Guatemala, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia then we see the same pattern also coming to ground
Olsson clearly shows how the New Deal and Cardeniste Mexico shape each other policy but with Henry A. Wallace losing in the Democrat Party election and Alemán as the successor Mexico president, the shifting policy would change the two nations course history and the world as a whole. First, this would change how Green Revolution would take place, first as more peasant-friendly plant breeding, as the Rockefeller agricultural program in Mexico had initially been for supporting peculiar postrevolutionary Mexico, and later as Borlaug's wheat program state promotion and subsidization of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizer, and pesticide across the nation.
This book clearly shows how agricultural debates its not about science vs politics, but about what kind of politic support what type of science. And we see, as the Cold War escalates the United States exported Green Revolution to Guatemala, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia then we see the same pattern also coming to ground
Displaying 1 of 1 review