From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Myrna Santiago’s passionate Ecology of Oil is the story of a long-anticipated ecological and human disaster. This catastrophe befell the Huasteca region along Mexico’s eastern coast when foreign investors and Mexican politicians believed that by taming the rainforest and displacing the indigenous people who had cultivated and defended the forest for centuries, they would embark on an unending road toward progress. In the view of the nineteenth century, in an age of railroads, factories, cities, and a powerful northern neighbor, the indigenous ecology — communal ownership of land and agricultural self-sufficiency — made no sense.
Once the oil in the Huasteca began to be extracted, everything and everybody was subordinated to the designs of the industry. Through painstaking research in many archives, Santiago depicts the process of dividing the no-man’s-land and other people’s land to make up the oilmen’s domain. Initially, the...
