The chapter opens with the ill-fated effort by the “apostle of Mexican democracy,” Francisco I. Madero, shortly before the Mexican Revolution to unite his fellow landowning, riverine Laguneros to lobby the government for a high dam on the Nazas River—a project President Díaz already supported. It then describes the longer-term historical ecology of the Laguna since the colonial period; how land tenure and water rights fit into and affected that ecology through irrigated cotton growing; and the emergence of agrarian reform as a broad process of social, legal, environmental, and technological change during the late Porfiriato and the Revolution. This...