Agrarian Crossings

Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside

Tore C. Olsson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888054
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

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.

Chapter One

PARALLEL AGRARIAN SOCIETIES

THE US SOUTH AND MEXICO, 1870S–1920S

IN THE last days of 1890, thousands of outraged farmers gathered in a small city, far from the halls of power, to protest their chronic exclusion from the fruits of land and labor. Those gathering were a diverse lot, yet they made their pilgrimage united in the belief that an unholy alliance of bankers, landlords, and railroad executives sought to pauperize tillers of the soil. In the past generation, these farmers had bitterly seen the erosion of their political and economic independence by the steady expansion of plantation agriculture, with many unwillingly pulled into the orbit of that system as tenants and sharecroppers. Most were bound up in the cultivation of a single cash crop that promised them abundance but rarely delivered on it, instead binding them to merchants and markets far beyond their control and understanding. In 1890, they decided that enough was enough. The grievances of the displaced and dispossessed crystallized that week in a list of “Demands” devoted to “the poor of our land.” Its authors sought to restrain the financial institutions that sacrificed farm autonomy to the barons of industry; they insisted on government action to reclaim and redistribute “all lands now held by aliens,” “foreign syndicates,” railroads, and “other corporations in excess of such as is used and needed by them.” Much publicized, their demands resonated widely and swelled the tide of their historic rural revolt.¹

Some twenty years later, in 1911, another group of agrarian rebels gathered with similar purpose. Congregating around their leader, a quiet but charismatic village councillor, dozens of marginalized farmers ranging from wageworkers to sharecroppers to small landholders put forth a prescription for rural justice. They presented a litany of angry objections not unlike those voiced two decades earlier. They, too, had seen commercial landowners dispossess formerly independent country people, claiming their land and binding them to staple-crop plantations as day laborers and tenants. They also had seen the ascent of the railroad agent and country merchant threaten the autonomy of the common farmer. As “lands, timber, and water are monopolized in a few hands,” the gathered protesters desperately confronted “the horrors of poverty without being able to improve their social condition.” At their meeting, the rebels distilled their grievances into a formal “Plan” for change that demanded the immediate restoration of “that real estate of which [small cultivators] have been despoiled by the bad faith of our oppressors.” On the plan’s proclamation, word of it spread across the countryside like wildfire, calling countless thousands to its cause.²

The 1890 meeting took place within the United States—in Ocala, Florida, where the southern Farmers’ Alliance convened to formalize its political platform; the 1911 gathering was held in Mexico, where in Ayala, Morelos State, Emiliano Zapata and his followers protested the government’s indifference to the dispossessed farmer. Their manifestos for change, the Ocala Demands and the Plan de Ayala, would prove foundational to two sweeping rural social movements: the US Populist revolt and the Mexican Revolution, respectively. Yet despite their parallels and proximity in time and space, the juxtaposition of Ocala and Ayala will be surprising and unexpected to many scholars. Segregated by the intellectual border dividing “American” from “Latin American” history, these two rural insurgencies are rarely placed in conversation. US southern populism is commonly remembered as a contradictory political movement, ultimately co-opted and destroyed; the Mexican Revolution is recalled as a bloody social uprising fueled by peasant discontent. Turn-of-the-century agrarian revolt in the United States and Mexico, most scholars therefore assume, has little common ground.

This chapter argues otherwise. The rural societies that gave birth to the Ocala and Ayala demands—the US cotton South and the diverse plantation zones of Mexico—underwent parallel social, political, and economic transformations between the 1870s and 1920s. Though in Mexico the violence and dislocation of those transformations was far magnified, a common trajectory underlay both. After the mid-nineteenth century’s chaos of war and instability, a muscular political elite came to power in each region with seductive promises of stability and growth. Together they sought to rationalize and order a chaotic and diverse countryside to produce export crops for global consumers, adopting the latifundium—large estate—as the basic unit of production.³ Their reordering of the countryside was both sweeping and rapid, but it largely benefited landlords while eroding the last semblances of independence and self-sufficiency among the rural majority. In response to the assault on their autonomy, country people revolted against the new order, putting forth their own vision for a stable and equitable rural society. Those rebels who led the most pointed attacks on the status quo were defeated politically and militarily. Yet in unanticipated ways, their smothered cry for change would live on and animate future generations of agrarian reformers later in the twentieth century.

Therefore, key moments in US and Mexican history—the “New South” era, the Porfiriato, the US Populist revolt, the Mexican Revolution, and their respective aftermath—might well be understood in common context. Historians of each nation have long pondered similar questions about the expansion of the plantation, enclosure movements, popular revolt, and land reform, but few have reached across the intellectual aisle to consider kindred elements within both. To do so decisively undermines narratives of US exceptionalism, as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the history of the cotton South converged far more neatly with that of the Caribbean basin than with the rest of the United States. In some ways, this is hardly a novel conclusion, as scholars of race, slavery, and emancipation have for generations employed comparative or transnational perspectives to understand the US South.⁴ Yet few such studies have looked beyond Reconstruction, and because of their emphasis on communities of the black diaspora, those scholars often excluded Mexico with its well-concealed heritage of African slavery.⁵ If historians were to look at race beyond the white/black binary, though, and expand their analysis to agrarian class relations in rural spaces, they would likely realize that Mexico provides as compelling a counterpoint to the US South as does Cuba, Haiti, or Brazil.

This book, at its heart, is an examination of the United States’ and Mexico’s intersecting and interactive agrarian histories. This chapter, which emphasizes parallel but largely separate transformations, thus is by definition an outlier. As a whole, it does not consider the ways that comparison informed the deeds and rhetoric of historical actors themselves. In fewer words, I do not argue that the Plan de Ayala was born from the Ocala Demands. Comparison here is our method rather than our subject; instead of a transnational history, it is a comparative one, with all the disadvantages that such an approach brings.⁶ But the rewards of such a comparison outweigh the risks, as the overlooked parallels between US and Mexican agrarian history and historiography in the turn-of-the-century period deserve examination. Narrating the shared history of dispossession, revolt, and its aftermath also sets the stage for the chapters following, revealing how and why rural reformers in each region came to discover and speak to one another in the 1930s and 1940s.

DISPOSSESSION

The middle decades of the nineteenth century brought utter chaos to both the US South and Mexico. While neither region could boast of a tranquil past, the years from 1846 to 1876 in Mexico and 1861 to 1877 in the South were each exceptional in their social disruptions and bloodletting. Each region underwent military invasion. In Mexico, the 1840s brought war with the United States and the loss of more than half its national territory. The 1860s ushered in a French imperial intervention, and a vicious struggle between liberals and conservatives that ultimately expelled the French but left Mexico devastated. In the US South, the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 toppled the institution of chattel slavery that had provided the region’s economic and social foundation. Like Mexico, the Confederate states weathered a northern invasion and occupation, and the war destroyed much of the region’s agricultural and industrial base. When the South and Mexico emerged from the martial turmoil of the mid-nineteenth century, their cities and countrysides lay in ruin.

Yet as the smoke of the battlefield began to clear, the questions raised by the US Civil War and Mexican political struggle of the 1860s lingered and demanded resolution. What fate awaited the millions once enslaved in the plantation South, and how would their quest for independence and freedom converge with demands for economic revival and stability? The Reconstruction experiment following the war’s end proposed one solution, but white southern resistance raised questions as to its permanence. Likewise, if Mexican liberals had triumphed over a monarchist elite, what would the seductive words of “democracy” and “progress” mean to the vast rural masses of the nation? Such dilemmas invited few easy answers.⁷

Over the next generation, a new—or at least reinvented—political ruling class in the US South and Mexico took the reins of power, seeking to guide their divided, war-torn lands toward a vision of social and economic progress that was startlingly alike. Indeed, two historical epochs that scholars rarely juxtapose—the “New South” period between 1877 and the century’s end, and the rule of Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911—share much in their guiding ideologies, processes, and consequences. Both were decidedly exclusive of the rural majority, and under each, the system of commercial, large-scale, export-oriented agriculture flowered and grew to unprecedented dominance.

After decades of turmoil in Mexico and the US South, the first step toward stabilization came in the arena of governance and rule, and their political transitions occurred strikingly close to one another. In 1876, General Díaz overthrew former ally Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada to take his place in the presidential palace. Born to a Mixtec Indian family in Oaxaca, near Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, Díaz came to prominence fighting in support of the nationalist liberal Benito Juárez during the 1850s and 1860s. Díaz justified his coup d’état against Lerdo by insisting that his rival had betrayed the liberal ideologies of effective suffrage and opposition to reelection that they had earlier fought for. On taking office, however, Díaz cast aside the slogans that had energized his coup. After surrendering the presidency to a puppet leader in 1880, Díaz returned in 1884 and remained in the presidential seat until evicted from it in 1911. As a ruler, Díaz was hardly a rigid ideologue, freely mixing political philosophies in search of social stability and economic growth. The long years of his rule, known in Mexico as the Porfiriato, were motivated by the twin goals of “order” and “progress,” as Díaz repeatedly emphasized. It was not a wholly unfair characterization of his regime. Of order there would be plenty, but it was enforced at the end of a rifle bayonet; likewise, Porfirian “progress” was a narrow and exclusive concept intimately wound up with elite yearnings to emulate US and European society.⁸

At nearly the same moment Díaz stabilized and harnessed the Mexican state, the campaign to reinstate home rule in the US South through the Democratic Party reached its climax. The bedrock of Republican political control established during Reconstruction had been steadily eroding since the early 1870s, due in large part to white vigilante violence, and became alarmingly visible in 1874 when Democrats gained a majority in the House of Representatives. But it was only in 1877, just months after Díaz’s coup, that the Democratic “redemption” of the South achieved its consummation. It was then that the US Army declared it would no longer prop up Republican state governments, thereby signaling a symbolic retreat from the past decade’s efforts to remake the region’s society and political economy. Across Dixie, a triumphant Democratic elite loudly proclaimed that a “New South” had been born from the ashes of the old—a South that nursed no regional grudges, but openly embraced northern industry and capital; a South not of black political participation and mobility, as the Reconstruction era had witnessed, but rather subservience and stability. Above all, the New South leadership imagined a diversified and commercial southern economy, liberated by the end of slavery, yet firmly preserving the class and caste hierarchies that had structured antebellum society.⁹

Once in power, Díaz and the New South Democrats subscribed to rather analogous programs of agrarian transformation. Both gazed out on patchwork landscapes starkly divided between commercial plantations and a peasant-yeoman agriculture rooted primarily in security and subsistence, and both strove to expand the former at the expense of the latter. In the US Cotton Belt, the New South leadership primarily sought to guarantee the availability of cheap black labor in plantation districts—a goal often accomplished through extralegal violence and intimidation. But they simultaneously worried about the large white yeoman class that existed on the outskirts of the cotton economy, clinging to its small plots despite the deprivations and debts incurred by the war. In the eyes of the planter elite, yeomen farmers offered the freedpeople a dangerous alternative, and indeed many former slaves sought to emulate the yeomanry’s landed independence.¹⁰

In Mexico, Díaz and his allies confronted a kaleidoscopic diversity of rural life, as Mexico was and indeed remains a nation of stark regional contrasts. The arid and mountainous north, sparsely populated and with far fewer indigenous people, then bore little resemblance to the temperate and densely settled center-south, anchored by Mexico City and with long traditions of native agriculture and land use. The coastal tropics and Yucatán Peninsula, in turn, diverged from both north and center. Even within the central-southern core that Díaz knew best, the countryside of 1876 was one of contrasts within contrasts. Vast cash crop haciendas coexisted alongside Indian and mestizo (mixed race) pueblos, or autonomous rural villages, where hunting, fishing, and agriculture on communally held lands served local rather than national needs. Such island communities, unmoved by the dreams and desires of urban elites, were ubiquitous in the central plateau, but could be found in nearly every region of Mexico. Like the New South Democrats, Díaz hoped to thrust this peasantry into capitalist and nationalist modernity, disdaining their marginal economies as obstacles to growth and centralization.¹¹

Both regimes began their effort to undermine noncapitalist agriculture by closing loopholes that had allowed country people to subsist beyond the market economy. In both the US South and Mexico, this amounted to an all-out war on the commons. As soon as the Civil War had ended and African American freedpeople struggled to flee the plantation, elite white southerners grew concerned that access to communal lands would provide the former slaves with enough land, food, and fuel to subsist beyond the cash crop economy. To guarantee their access to cheap and pliable labor, states across the former Confederacy passed fencing and stock laws during the 1860s and 1870s to privatize formerly public lands as well as restrict unauthorized hunting, fishing, and foraging on them, with considerable success. To the freedpeople, this closed an important path to independence. Yet it was not only African Americans who were affected by such enclosures. The privatization of the open range also presented a fundamental threat to the economic autonomy of the white yeomen, whose reliance on public lands was essential to their livelihoods.¹²

In Mexico, the war on the rural commons was even more dramatic. For centuries after the Spanish conquest, the landed elite and indigenous pueblos had negotiated an unspoken agreement wherein landlords rarely fretted about peasant use of communal lands as long as labor was regularly supplied to the hacienda for the planting and harvesting of cash crops. Across the Mexican countryside, such common space most often manifested itself in the ejido—derived from the Latin exitus, or “exit”—which was an ambiguous legal category encompassing forest, pastureland, or fields belonging to pueblos, and reserved for their communal use. Beginning in the 1850s, though, liberals inspired by laissez-faire economic doctrine waged war on these informal agrarian economies. Díaz continued those campaigns with even greater vigor, believing that only private landownership would stimulate Mexico’s agricultural growth. During his rule, a legion of land surveyors crisscrossed rural Mexico, signing over ejidos with murky colonial era legal titles to commercial landowners. Yet land privatization was not solely the product of state intervention. In coastal Veracruz, where export vanilla production boomed in the late nineteenth century, prosperous indigenous cultivators took the lead in carving up village plots for individual use. All in all, during Díaz’s three decades in power, more than 127 million acres of communal, idle, or unoccupied lands, representing over half of Mexico’s arable farmland, fell into private hands.¹³

Hoping to open up newly privatized lands to intensive use, US southern and Mexican elites courted external capital. In the former Confederacy, enterprising northern businesspeople had already arrived in large numbers following the end of the Civil War, and New South Democrats smiled on these newcomers. Under the watch of the new political elite, New York-, Boston-, and London-based financiers invested heavily in the postbellum southern economy. Bankers, merchants, and investors from across the United States and Europe siphoned untold sums into new plantations, cotton mills, logging and forestry operations, and mining towns. The influx of capital fueled a burst of rapid industrialization and econ...