The Second Agrarian Reform

The chapter tells the story of the controversial postrevolutionary revival of the Nazas River Dam project, the burgeoning growth of motorized groundwater pumping, and how both played an important role in the region’s tumultuous sociopolitical transformation of the 1920s and 1930s. It describes how a shifting kaleidoscope of local and national actors transcended class and political divisions to form coalitions that lobbied for and against the dam as it became a contentious symbol of postrevolutionary envirotechnical modernity. At the same time, because of its smaller scale and individual adoption, groundwater pumping was far less controversial but more prevalent and just as ecologically consequential.