[Sci-tech-public] TODAY: 2015 IAP History Seminar Series

[Margo F Collett]

You are warmly invited to


“Water for the Revolution: An Envirotech History of Agrarian Reform in ‘La Laguna,’ Mexico”

Mikael Wolfe
Assistant Professor, Stanford University

I use an envirotech approach to revise understanding of Mexican agrarian reform, the principal raison d’être of the 1910 Mexican Revolution central to postrevolutionary Mexican state formation.  I focus on the understudied role of engineers (técnicos) trying to supply sufficient water for massive land redistribution in the arid north central cotton rich Laguna region in 1936. Serving as mediators between the state, society, and nonhuman nature, I argue that técnicos faced an inherent contradiction between the urgency for water conservation and satisfying insatiable demand for water by deploying invasive hydraulic technology—a contradiction that made agrarian reform unsustainable in the long term.


Monday, January 26
E51-275
4:00-5:30 PM


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