The Shared Struggle to Remake the U.S. and Mexican Countryside in the 20th Century

FAIN: FA-232782-16

Tore Carl Olsson
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

A book-length study of the interaction between U.S. and Mexican efforts to modernize agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s, and their influence on the attempt to modernize Third World agriculture during the Cold War.

During the 1930s and 1940s, government and civil society in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. This book project examines how those campaigns were intertwined and forged in dialogue with one another. It examines key historical moments – the Mexican Revolution and its push for land reform, the New Deal's agrarian program, and the global "Green Revolution" to promote scientific agriculture – and unshackles them from the separate national frameworks to which they are frequently bound. In doing so, the book reveals that the rural histories of the United States and Mexico share far more than is often imagined.

Associated Products

Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside (Book)
Title: Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside
Author: Tore C. Olsson
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Princeton: Princeton University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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