Sterling Evans, History

Dr. Sterling Evans came to Brandon University in 2005 from Humboldt State University in California, where he was an Associate Professor of History. Dr. Evans is presently an Associate Professor in the History Department at Brandon University.

Canada Research Chairs at Brandon University have a smaller teaching load than other faculty members, so that they may devote more time to their research. While Dr. Evans is currently (Fall 2007) on sabbatical, he has taught several courses over the past two years in Brandon University's Department of History, including:

54:284 The United States to 1877

54:285 The United States Since 1877

54:291 Modern Latin America

54:361 History of Mexico

54/88:459 Seminar in Agricultural History

As the Canada Research Chair in History, Dr. Evans is currently carrying out studies on agricultural dependencies and markets and environmental change in the transnational Great Plains and Mexico, and the history of conservation and other environmental issues elsewhere in Latin America.

Dr. Evans's Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Yucatan and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950, was published this year by College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

For more information about Dr. Evans please visit: http://www.brandonu.ca/History/Evans.htm

Sterling Evans

Department of History, Brandon University; Brandon, MB R7A 6A9

Education

Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, Aug. 1997, History. Comprehensive Examination
Fields: Modern Latin America, Colonial Latin America, the American West, Environmental History.

M.A. UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, Dec. 1992, Latin American Studies.

Other Graduate Work:
UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING, 1984, course work in Mexican and Andean studies.

B.A. ANDERSON UNIVERSITY (IN), May 1981. Graduated with Honors in Spanish.
Majors: Spanish, History, Education. Minor: French.

Other Undergraduate Work:
MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE (VT), 1979, summer Spanish language program;
UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA (SPAIN), 1980, semester study abroad program

Professional Experience

2005 - : Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in History; Brandon University; Brandon, MB (Canada)

1998-2005: Assis./Assoc. Professor of History; Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA

1997-1998: Sessional Assistant Professor of History; University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB

1992-1996: Assistant Instructor; University of Kansas; Lawrence, KS

1993-1994: Teaching Assistant; University of Kansas; Lawrence, KS

Publications

books:

Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Yucatan and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007 (306 pages).

The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999 (317 pages).

edited anthologies:

The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the 49^th Parallel, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006 (369 pages).

American Indians in American History, 1870-2001: A Companion Reader , Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002 (249 pages).

articles:

"History and Environment in Mexico: An Historiographical Introduction," guest introduction to new edition of Charles H. Harris III, The Sánchez-Navarros: A

Socio-economic Study of a Coahuilan Latifundio, 1856-1853, (forthcoming).

"Green Historiography: The State of Latin American Conservation History," in Reinaldo Funes, ed., Naturaleza en la historia: tema de historia ambiental Latinoamericana y caribeña, (forthcoming).

"The Anguish of Angosturas: The Socio-Environmental Consequences of Dam-Building in Sonora," Signos Históricos (Mexico), forthcoming, sum./fall 2007.

"Dependent Harvests: Grain Production on the American and Canadian Plains and the Double Dependency with Mexico," Agricultural History 80:1 (Winter 2006), 35-63.

"Entwined in Conflict: The South Dakota State Prison Twine Plant and the Controversy of 1919-1921," South Dakota History 35:2 (Summer 2005), 95-124.

"From Kanasín to Kansas: Mexican Sisal, Binder Twine, and the State Penitentiary Twine Factory, 1890-1940," Kansas History-Journal of the Central Plains 24:4 (Winter 2001-2002), 276-299.

"Prison-Made Binder Twine: North Dakota's Connection with Mexico in the Early Twentieth Century," North Dakota History-Journal of the Northern Plains 68:1 (2001), 20-36.

"Yaquis vs. Yanquis: An Environmental and Historical Comparison of Coping with Aridity in Southern Sonora," Journal of the Southwest 40:3 (Autumn 1998), 363-96.

"Eastward Ho! The Mexican Freighting and Commerce Experience Along the Santa Fe Trail," Kansas History-Journal of the Central Plains 19:4 (Winter 1997), 242-61.

"At Union's Brink: Ideals and Problems in Restoring the United Provinces of Central America, 1920-1922," Latin American Research Review 32:1 (1997), 69-87.

encyclopedia entries:

"Northern Plains," "Wheat," "The United States and Canada," and "Badlands," in Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, New York: Clio, forthcoming.

"Central America," "Mexico," and "Fiber Crops" in Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, New York: Routledge, 2004.

book reviews:

of David G. McCrady: Living with Strangers: The Nineteenth-Century Sioux and the Canadian-American Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), in American Historical Review (Apr. 2007), 487.

of Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), in Idaho Yesteryears (forthcoming).

of Craig Miner, Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890-1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), in Agricultural History (forthcoming).

of John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), in Environmental History11:4 (Oct. 2006), 853-854.

of Virgil Dean, ed. John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas2006), in South Dakota History 36:4 (Winter 2006), 410-411.

of John K. Bukowczyk, et al, Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650-1990 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), in Journal of American EthnicHistory, 26:1 (Fall 2006), 97-98.

of E. N. Anderson, Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), in Agricultural History (forthcoming).

of M. Bonnell and L. A. Bruijnzeel, eds. Forests, Water, and People in the Humid Tropics: Past, Present, and Future Hydrological Research for Integrated Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), in Environmental History 11:2 (Apr. 2006), 365-366.

of Carol Higham and Robert Thacker, eds. One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader (University of Calgary Press, 2004) in Histoire Sociale / Social History 38:76 (Nov. 2005), 519-521.

of Joshua Blu Buhs, The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2004) in Environmental Conservation (Summer 2005 ).

of Simon Evans, The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History (University of Calgary Press, 2003) in Agricultural History 50:4 (Fall 2006), 482-484.

of Ana Guadalupe Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan, Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History (University of Arizona Press, 2004) in Agricultural History 78:4 (Fall 2004).

of Evan R. Ward, Border Oasis: Water and the Political Ecology of the Colorado River Delta, 1940-1975 (University of Arizona Press) in Western Historical Quarterly 35:1 (Spring 2004), 78-79.

of Norma Smith, Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience (Montana Historical Society Press, 2002) in Montana The Magazine of Western History 53:1 (Spring 2003), 87.

of Shawn William Miller, Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford University Press, 2000) in Canadian Journal of History 37 (Dec. 2002), 594-596.

double review of Robin L. Anderson, Colonization as Exploitation in the Amazon Rainforest, 1758-1911 (University Press of Florida, 1999) and M.D. Faminow, Cattle Deforestation and Development in the Amazon: An Economic, Agronomic and Environmental Perspective (CABI, 1998) in Environmental History 6:2 (Apr. 2001), 332-334.

of William Balée, ed. Advances in Historical Ecology (Columbia University Press, 1998) in Environmental History 4:2 (Apr. 1999), 287-288.

of Alan Weisman, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998) in Hope Magazine (Nov./Dec. 1998), 70.

Research in Progress

Damming Sonora: Water, Agriculture, and Environmental Change in Northwest Mexico. This is a book-length study that highlights the development of a series of hydro projects that have forever changed the natural and agricultural landscapes of Sonora, and that have had profound social implications on the people of the state. The research is completed on this project, and have presented papers out of this research at conferences. I am on a writing sabbatical semester in fall of 2007 to complete the manuscript for the University of Arizona Press for its series on Borderlands Environmental History.

B adlands!: The History and Conservation of the Badlands of the North American West. From Native Americans to Theodore Roosevelt to efforts to establish preserved "park" areas, the badlands of North America (in northern Mexico, the western United States, and Canada) have had a storied history. This book-length project will seek to address this lesser known dimension of North American environmental and conservation history by tracing differing views and understandings of what badlands are, their differing perceptions and land uses by Native and newcomer peoples, and how various state, provincial, and national governments have come to preserve them. Case studies from the Sierra del Pinacate (Sonora), the Malpais (New Mexico), Devil's Playground (southern California), Hell's Half Acre (Wyoming), Toadstool Park (Nebraska), Craters of the Moon National Monument (Idaho), Badlands National Park (South Dakota), Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Dakota), and the Hoodoos, Valley of the Moon, and Milk River Badlands (all in Alberta) will be examined.

North American Environmental History: A Continental Approach to Readings on Canada, the United States, and Mexico. I am compiling and editing a collection of essays by scholars in the field of environmental history that will be published in an anthology format. The collection will center on varying transnational aspects of Canadian, U.S., and Mexican history that relate to environmental change in the region over time. Emphasis will be placed on transnational and borderlands interactions that have caused environmental change. Likewise, the volume will include thematic articles that consider such topics as implications on Native North America, conservation, agriculture, trade and economics, international relations, and urban change. It will include essays written by scholars from each of the three countries.

Languages

I am fluent in Spanish, and can read, write, and communicate in French and Portuguese.

For guest introduction to new edition of Charles H. Harris III, The Sánchez-Navarros: A Socio-economic Study of a Coahuilan Latifundio, 1846-1853

History and Environment in Mexico:

An Historiographical Introduction to the New Edition

The first line of Charles Harris's book The Sánchez-Navarros: A Socio-economic Study of a Coahuilan Latifundio, 1846-1853 states it all: "The land problem has been of continuing importance in the history of Mexico."[1] The focus on land that is inherent in the history of the Sánchez-Navarro estate in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila situates Harris's study squarely in a kind of proto-environmental history. Although it was written in the early 1960s before the development of that subdiscipline, the underlying theme of The Sánchez-Navarros is the interrelationship between humans and the natural world, and in this case, between the owners and workers of a vast latifundio estate and the semi-arid, desert terrain in which they lived. Those people included the wealthy hacienda owners, their many herders and fieldhands, and the nomadic indigenous peoples of Coahuila (primarily Comanches and Lipan Apaches) who competed for resources with the Mexicans and often raided their livestock herds as a way of trying to survive in an ever more Hispanicized Mexican North.

All are in Harris' study here. Although the book perhaps could be classified more as a social history than an environmental history, the book is useful for the environmental history of northern Mexico. Noting the role of nature on this area, Harris explained that

Much of Coahuila was semi-arid, with scanty and irregular rainfall. Such geography was not conducive to the growth of small individual holdings, which were in danger of bankruptcy during prolonged periods of drought when crops failed and livestock died by the hundreds. . . . It would seem that the latifundio, despite its many drawbacks, was the form of land tenure best suited to the conditions obtaining Coahuila at midcentury.[2]

Cyclical droughts were especially hard on herders, affecting both large-scale and small campesino operations. Harris discovered that the Coahuilan drought of 1851 was particularly harsh and resulted in massive losses of livestock and crops, misery for local farmers and villagers, and trickle-down economic disadvantages in the cities that serviced the area.[3]

Historiographically, there is a rich tradition of hacienda history that is usually placed in the category of Mexican rural history.[4] Eric Van Young, in an important review article, defined rural history "to mean the economic and social relationships of settled farming people living outside cities, specifically with regard to production of goods from the land."[5] Harris's study complies well with that definition and was one of the first such works in the field, especially for northern Mexico, drawing on the seminal work of French historian François Chevalier's La formation des grands domains au Mexique (1952).[6] There is also an important body of literature on the development of the livestock industry in northern Mexico, much of which was published around the time of Harris's The Sánchez-Navarros or later in the 1960s and 1970s.[7] And finally, some historians have concentrated more on the social and labor dimensions of the haciendas, especially on the encomienda of workers on which the estates depended.[8]

As rural history, then, The Sánchez-Navarros also fits well into the recently reinvigorated and evolving genre of agricultural history, one that is paying attention to the many kinds of historical analyses regarding farming and herding or ranching in all parts of the world.[9] Formerly associated primarily with "the technology and economics of production,"[10] agricultural history in North America now seeks to embrace the social, economic, labor, and environmental dimensions of the land-people relationship. In Europe, the term "agrarian history" is more popular for this type of rural or agricultural analysis, especially for a broader understanding of rural social structure.[11] But no matter what the academic label, in Mexico it was, and continues to be, all about the "land problem."

The Sánchez-Navarros was originally Harris's M.A. thesis from the University of Texas that won the nationally contested William P. Lyons Master's Essay Award in 1963, and that included publication by Loyola University Press. How Harris came to choose his thesis topic stems from his upbringing in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Charles Houston Harris III was born in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, and raised between there and Fort Worth, Texas, giving him an innate sense of history and place. "I became interested in Mexican history during the summers I spent in Chihuahua while I was growing up," he related, "listening to the old guys lie about how they'd ridden with Pancho Villa." He went to the University of Texas for his undergraduate degree and then began to prepare for a career in law. But, as he acknowledged, "during a brief stint in law school," which bored him, he recognized his true interest in Mexican history. "By getting a PhD in history I could spend my career reading about and doing research in Mexico, so I made the switch—one of the best things I've ever done." Specifically for the Coahuilan latifundio topic, Harris reminisced, "I got involved in writing about the Sánchez-Navarros because my M.A. advisor, Tom McGann, informed me that the Latin American Collection [at the University of Texas Library] had most of that family's archive and because of my background he thought I should use it."[12]

After completing his Master's, Harris stayed on at the University of Texas for his doctoral degree (1968). He also stayed with the topic of the Sánchez-Navarro family for his dissertation, "A Mexican Latifundio: The Economic Empire of the Sánchez-Navarro Family, 1765-1821," mining the family archive more completely and taking the story back to the late colonial era and up to the time of Mexican independence. Later he expanded the work even further, extending it chronologically another fifty some years to 1867 and had it published as A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the Sánchez-Navarros, 1765-1867 (1975)—a work that complemented the rapidly growing body of hacienda historiography by that time (that also included a number of works on Jesuit haciendas).[13] By then his teaching career was well underway. He first taught as a Mexicanist historian at California State University, Long Beach (1966-1969), and later at New Mexico State University from 1969 until his retirement in 1996. While in Las Cruces, he and his NMSU historian colleague and friend Louis R. "Ray" Sadler co-wrote three other books: The Border and the Revolution (1988), The Archaeologist Was a Spy: Sylvanus G. Morley and the Office of Naval Intelligence (2003), and The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920 (2004).[14] They are currently at work on a fourth joint effort on the topic of --------------------------------.

The value of a new edition of The Sánchez-Navarros is in its relevance for the studies of Mexican haciendas and for an emerging environmental historiography of Mexico. University of Arizona historian William Beezley, who has often assigned the book in his classes on Modern Mexico, points to how standard studies of Mexican latifundia tended to make "all haciendas economically inefficient and socially repressive institutions." But, he continued, "Harris said that the Mexican haciendas, especially this one, in the North were in fact a reasonable institutional response to the environment (including the nomadic peoples in the region)."[15] Thus, the study of the Sánchez-Navarro hacienda can add understanding to the environmental history of Mexico to show how humans and nature have interacted over time to forge what is today a vibrant and diverse country. But Mexico also has had severe environmental dilemmas, and its history helps explain the roots of those dilemmas and why they are so difficult to solve.[16]

At 1.9 million square kilometers, Mexico is the second-largest country in Latin America (after Brazil). The mountains of the Sierra Madre dominate Mexico's physical landscape; the Sierra Madre Oriental runs north to south on Mexico's eastern side, and the Sierra Madre Occidental (with extensive pine forests at certain elevations, especially in Chihuahua) form a spine from north to south on the western side. Between the ranges are plateaus, deserts, and valleys with dry, harsh climates—meaning that only ten percent of the country is useful for agriculture, and much of that requires intense irrigation.[17] In Mexico's southern region are more mountains, some of which are active volcanoes, and dense tropical forests. Like appendages sticking out from both ends, Mexico's two peninsulas have unique characteristics. The Yucatan Peninsula in the Southeast is flat and dominated by low scrub deciduous forest, and Baja California in the Northwest is characterized by the Sonoran Desert and the San Pedro Mártir Mountains. One of Mexico's most unique, and most threatened, ecosystems is the Pacific tropical dry forest (bosque seco tropical) that originally extended along much of the west coast from Chiapas to southern Sonora. Unique in that unlike the well-known tropical rainforests of southern Mexico, the bosque seco is a deciduous forest that turns brown in the seasonally dry winter months, which reminded European newcomers of the type of landscapes they were accustomed to in Spain for livestock production and agriculture, and causing its large-scale conversion to an agro-landscape.[18] The deserts, mountains, tropical forests (humid and dry), and lack of any major, navigable rivers have been blamed as geographic barriers to transportation, communication, and economic development over time. However, with such diversity of regions, climates, and ecosystems the country is often considered to be "many Mexicos."[19]

Equally diverse is Mexico's rich indigenous heritage. How pre-Columbian populations thrived in such diverse environmental conditions merits attention. In the northern deserts some groups, such as the Chichamecs, were nomadic, making optimum resource use of hunting and gathering. Others, such as the Yaquis in southern Sonora, practiced floodgate irrigation in the rich Yaqui River delta. In southern Mexico, great cities flourished in the Mayan and Nahua (Aztec) empires—cities that required considerable quantities of food and natural resources. To meet those needs, Indians created an intercropping system planting maize in rows, nitrogen-fixing beans besides the corn to restore nutrients and to climb up the corn stalks, and a variety of squashes between the rows. The squash leaves provided a protective cover against the sun for the beans, and acted as a natural control against insects.

In the Valley of Mexico, where the invading Nahua established the great city of Tenochtitlán, the Mexica and other local indigenous groups had developed a unique form of agriculture called chinampas. This highly productive farming method used beds of mud and decayed plant material in the region's lake shallows for the planting of a vast array of grains and vegetables that provided a nutritious and diverse diet. The Indians harvested the chinampas several times a year, which supported Tenochtitlán—a city of an estimated 235,000 people by the mid-fifteenth century.[20] Further, as one historian has noted, "the chinampas aided soil and forest conservation by reducing pressures to burn steep wooded hillsides for farming."[21] This efficient farming practice continues today near Xochimilco, but much of the chinampas land has been destroyed by urban sprawl in the greater Mexico City area.

Further south, the Mayans of Yucatán and Chiapas used milpa (corn plot) farming—fields made by clearing and burning lands in the tropical forests. With efficient intercropping, they too were able to sustain large populations until the tenth century CE, when their advanced civilizations suffered a demographic collapse. The reasons for the collapse are not entirely known today, but most scholars agree that it was due to the Mayans exceeding their carrying capacity, some cataclysmic event (that could have been weather-related causing famines), internal political divisiveness, or external military aggression, or a combination of all the above. But despite their environmental limitations, the Maya, like all indigenous societies, maintained a spiritual relationship with nature. For them the ceiba tree was sacred—it held up the four corners of the world; also the souls of their dead went under it, and therefore it was not to be felled. Their respect and fear of the forest helped to preserve it.[22] Today, ceiba trees are still considered sacred by the Maya, but the silky hairs that surround their seedpods, a substance known as kapok, are harvested as an important fiber crop used as filler in mattresses and life preservers.

Into this world came Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century. Hernán Cortés and his crew invaded Mexico in 1519 with riches and domination in mind. With the help of some indigenous groups who had suffered under Nahua imperialism, and superior military technology using firearms and horses, by 1521 Cortés was triumphant in claiming Mexico for Spain. The Spanish monarchs then established the viceroyalty of New Spain and sent other conquistadors, explorers, and priests to secure the colony. Diseases the Europeans brought with them, against which the Indians had no immunities, facilitated the colonization project. Epidemics of influenza, measles, typhus, and especially smallpox caused such high mortality that by the mid-seventeenth century the indigenous population of the region was between 5 and 10 percent of what it had been in 1500. Thus, in great part the conquest was a biological one.[23]

Other environmental changes occurred when the colonizers introduced crops and livestock that produced food that they were used to in Spain. Wheat, malt barley, and wine grapes became new standard staple crops. Mediterranean fruits and olives replaced much of the local produce. A variety of weeds that traveled with the Europeans competed with, and often overtook, native plant habitats.[24] Cattle and sheep, however, caused the greatest ecological transformations, especially given that there were no native livestock or hoofed animals in pre-Columbian Mexico. What has been called "ungulate irruptions" occurred when livestock exceeded the carrying capacity of rangelands and caused plant communities to crash until a plant-animal accommodation plateau was reached. This was especially apparent with sheep in the Mezquital Valley northeast of Mexico City by the end of the sixteenth century when intensive grazing caused severe erosion and deterioration of the valley's environment.[25] Crosby referred to these introduced European pathogens, weeds, agricultural crops, and domesticated animals as a "portmanteau biota" that traveled from the Old World to the New.[26]

The Spaniards also introduced plantation agriculture in the areas that were conducive to growing sugarcane and, with even greater environmental implications, began large-scale mining ventures.[27] Gold and silver were in high demand in Europe, and Mexico's vast underground reserves were soon discovered and exploited using the colonial encomienda labor system. Similar to slavery, the process exploited indigenous people and helped transform landscapes. Mining, with its demand for timber to support shafts and food to feed miners, was especially damaging.[28] Finally, exporting sugar, minerals, and other raw materials during the colonial era set Mexico on a dependency pathway that continued long after independence.

When Mexicans won their independence in 1810 their national map included all of New Spain—from Guatemala to the Oregon-California border (the forty-second parallel). Granted, there were few Spanish settlements in the vast area that is now the U.S. Southwest, only missions and scattered settlements along the California coast and in northern New Mexico. However, Mexico lost that land, nearly half its territory, in the Mexican-American War (or the War of American Aggression, as it is called in Mexico) by 1848—just before gold was discovered in California. The lost land and resources became a boon for an expanding United States. This was the time period of Harris' study here in which the impact of the Mexican-American War on the Sánchez-Navarro family's ranching enterprise in Coahuila is explained.[29]

During the formative years of its new nationhood, Mexico was ruled by General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1833-1855), under whose command the country lost so much land and suffered from stagnant economic growth. A revolt against his dictatorship in 1858 promulgated a new government, that of Benito Juárez who believed in liberal economic policy. Juárez's liberal policies advocated modernization, material progress, and the increased development of natural resources. Thus Mexico began to disburse funds for railroads, mines, and other national projects, which often were at the expense of indigenous communities and hastened the pace of altering natural environments. Forests were cleared, mountainsides were often overgrazed and were studded with mining operations and tailings piles, and vast open areas were converted to intensive agriculture.

This pattern only accelerated during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911), whose advisors were schooled in European positivism—a belief that economic development follows private property, modernized agriculture, expanded transportation and communications, and an educational system bent on science and engineering. Thus Díaz's policies converted a great deal of native land to plantation agriculture to sell cotton, sugar, henequen (a fiber crop grown in Yucatán and used to make rope and twine), and later vegetables on the international market. His government emphasized mining, especially that of copper, which was high in demand due to a growing world market for electrical conduit. It also expanded Mexico's railway system, nearly quadrupling its number of miles, to transport the agricultural and mineral commodities to ports.[30]

Despite the social and ecological changes (e.g. eroded hillsides, clear-cut forests, polluted streams and rivers from mining operations, and dammed valleys) that these developments caused, the expected economic benefits never materialized for the majority of Mexicans. The projects were dependent on foreign investments, 80 percent from the United States, meaning that profits went to large land and business owners. By 1910 half of Mexico's land was controlled by three hundred families. Likewise, the railroads made it easier for people to relocate, as observed by the thousands of landless peasants who traveled to the cities to seek work. The newcomers, often having to live in slums on the outskirts of cities, helped Mexico City become a metropolis. Thus a radically changing urban environment, and all its resource pressures, were outcomes of the porfiriato.

The tyranny and economic malaise of the Díaz years prompted Mexico's revolution and civil war (1910-1920). Along with political reforms, limiting presidents to one six-year term, central to the revolution was agrarian reform to return lands that been taken from campesinos and indigenous groups. As a result, Article 27 of the Constitution made foreign ownership of land and subsurface resources illegal. It restored much of the land to ejidos—communal lands cooperatively operated by campesinos or Indians.

President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) accelerated this process by enacting 66 percent of all agrarian reforms between the revolution and 1940. The largest ejido established, 3.2 million hectares, was in the La Laguna cotton-growing district of Coahuila and Durango. Cárdenas further encouraged these communal ventures by creating ejido credit banks (for loans to purchase seeds and farming equipment) and by supporting large irrigation projects. By the 1950s and 1960s dams and hydroelectric projects sprouted up all over Mexico forever changing rivers, valleys, and the lives of people who were displaced by the dams' reservoirs.[31] In 1938 the Cárdenas government nationalized oil reserves to create Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), a move that infuriated U.S. oil companies and that hastened Mexico to become a petroleum-exploring,

-consuming, and –exporting country, with all the ecological changes those activities bring.[32]

Cárdenas was also the first president to take an active interest in conservation by pushing for the country's first forest reserves and national parks. To assist him in this endeavor, he selected Miguel Angel de Quevedo to head the new Department of Forestry, Fish, and Game. De Quevedo, who had founded the Mexican Forestry Society in 1922, was an expert on hydrology and watershed management and believed strongly in protecting forests. He advocated sustainable logging, and he worked to establish some forty national parks (although they are small in size compared to their counterparts in the United States or Canada).[33]

Mexico continued to modernize its agriculture and to industrialize in the 1940s and 1950s. During that period, the country was the first site of the "Green Revolution"—a program developed in the United States and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to increase crop yields in less-developed nations through the use of high-yield hybridized seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.[34] It was in the Yaqui Valley of southern Sonora where Rockefeller Foundation plant breeders Norman Borlaug and John Niederhauser introduced their technological research on hybridized dwarf wheat seeds in 1947. However, most of the program was directed to monocrops for export, which started Mexico on the road to dependency on synthetic, often foreign-made, chemicals that have caused health problems and deaths of agricultural workers over the years.[35] Nonetheless, Borlaug returned to Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, in 1996 and declared that the Yaqui Valley "is one of the most progressive areas that I have had the privilege of working in over these past five decades. The valley is blessed with fertile soils, a good irrigation system and dynamic and friendly people who are receptive to the research and improved technology."[36]

As Mexico further developed its manufacturing industries, millions of citizens flocked to the country's major cities for factory jobs. Mexico City grew at alarming rates (from an area of 116 square kilometers in 1940 to 1,250 square kilometers by 1990, and by then with an estimated population of 21 million that was growing by one thousand persons a day), and pollution became a severe environmental and health problem. Smog, an especially visible representation of the problem, accounts for why 80 percent of all days in the Federal District had unacceptable ozone levels, with an estimated 3.9 million metric tons of pollutants emitted into the air every year. Likewise, 40 percent of the city is without an adequate sewage system.[37] The crisis did help spawn the development of an environmental movement in Mexico, however. One of the most active groups is the Grupo de Cien (Group of One Hundred), founded by environmental activists and writers Homero and Betty Aridjis, which lobbies for environmental policies.[38]

Urban, agricultural, and environmental problems continue to plague Mexico in the early years of the twenty-first century. And since 1994 with Mexico's entrance into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), will the national economy improve as its promoters promised, or will increased "free" trade lead to more chemical-dependent export agriculture, and ecologically unsound mining and logging operations, as warned by its opponents? If the record of the last twelve years is any indication, the latter will continue to ring true, without providing the dreamed of employment and economic gains.[39] In fact, since NAFTA policies were adopted, more and more Mexicans have sought work (legally or illegally) in the United States, causing the governments of both countries in the post-1990s to try to deal with the increased immigration,[40] including the U.S. initiative to construct a gigantic wall along the Mexican border in the states of New Mexico, Arizona, and California.[41] Along with the diplomatic and social ramifications such a wall will have, scholars will have to study its long-range environmental effects, which will include the interruption of the free transfer of wildlife to and fro across the border, potential drainage and erosion problems in the desert, and the predictable environmental impacts that will accompany the construction process (with huge earth-moving equipment, road-building to service the machinery, and the addition of hundreds of human workers in the fragile desert landscape).

The maquiladora industry in Mexico was at first located in the cities along the border with the United States but since the 1990s more and more assembly plants have moved into Mexico's interior. It operates with fewer and less-enforced environmental regulations than U.S. factories, and grew rapidly in the wake of NAFTA. It has also been a controversial industry with labor, as the majority of maquilas are non-unionized.[42] In the last several years, however, Mexico has witnessed a slowing of the maquila sector, with some foreign-owned firms (primarily U.S., Canadian, and Japanese) moving their offshore assembly plants to even cheaper labor venues like El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, China, Indonesia, and especially Vietnam. This leaves thousands of Mexican workers without the jobs they had moved to the border cities to have (or hoped they would have), adding further pressure to city social services and to infrastructures like water and sewage systems.[43]

In 1994, the inauguration of NAFTA also prompted an uprising in Chiapas by the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), which continues its protests into the twenty-first century. The Zapatistas claim that neo-liberal economic policies like NAFTA eat away at their natural resources without benefiting the residents, especially the Indians, of Chiapas.[44] They have demanded more local control and want to protect the tropical environment of their state. However, they were upset when Mexico joined forces with the United Nations to identify a World Biosphere Reserve in the Lacandón Forest in a large area of Chiapas that borders Guatemala, especially since no local indigenous groups were given a voice in the decision making process.[45]

A further NAFTA issue in Mexico is a concern with genetically modified corn from multinational agribusinesses that can pollute the gene pool of native varieties. With NAFTA's focus on ending agricultural tariffs, Mexico now allows wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, pork, beef, and twenty other agricultural imports (including seeds that are often genetically modified for high yields, but reduce crop, genetic, and nutrition diversity) from the United States to enter Mexico tariff free. Even with protective tariffs remaining on imports of corn and beans into Mexico (which Mexico is scheduled to eliminate in 2008), U.S. farmers enjoy a very real advantage since they often receive government subsidies and other federal crop supports and have better access to irrigation, fertilizers, and equipment to stabilize yields.[46] Mexican farmers, not being able to compete against the subsidized agribusinesses, often leave their rural areas and head either to cities in search of factory jobs (often unsuccessfully), or to the Mexico-U.S. border for jobs in maquilas (now in decline), or they try to immigrate to the United States.

Finally, tourism is now Mexico's top earner of foreign currency and is at the root of many environmental problems along the country's many beautiful beaches. Environmentalists worry about its continued effects.[47] NAFTA has encouraged increased tourism and "snowbirding" from Canada and the United States to Mexico, and thus large-scale hotels, resorts, and R.V. campgrounds continue to be built along pristine beaches and in other tropical venues in Mexico. Conservation efforts continue with earmarked national parks, but funds and bureaucratic priorities to manage them effectively or to increase their sizes for improved transfer of biological properties (or to improve corridors for wildlife habitat) are insufficient. Thus, Mexico, like elsewhere in Latin America, has experienced a rise in small, private conservation measures (often on indigenous reserves for economic development) to encourage North American and European ecotourism—a topic wide open for further research and analysis as that industry continues to develop in the twenty-first century.[48]

These and many other environmental, rural, and agricultural topics should keep historians of Mexico busy for decades to come. And certainly environmental history is adding to the analysis of this array of topics.[49] More attention will need to be given to forestry and conservation history, although good first steps have been initiated with studies on Mexico's community forests.[50] Regarding northern Mexico, borderlands topics should continue to be investigated through the lens of environmental history. Questions from the past on transboundary water rights, agricultural and mining development, and conservation initiatives will have implications on into the twenty-first century.[51]

These topics should compel us to continue studying past land uses, such as those of the historic haciendas of northern Mexico. The publication of this new edition of The Sánchez-Navarros—one of the first works on the topic, is thus indeed timely. Others have followed more recently in Charles Harris's footsteps with their own innovative approaches to Mexican hacienda history.[52] But although the great haciendas eventually faded, in large part due to the agrarian reforms ushered in by the Mexican Revolution,[53] their legacy on the rural, agricultural, and environmental history of Mexico offers valuable insights worthy of historical inquiry.

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