Social Landscaping in the Forests of Mexico: An Environmental Interpretation of Cardenismo, 1934–1940

Abstract

This article reinterprets the pivotal presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico, (1934–40) through the prism of environmental history. The Cárdenas administration is best known for its use of land reform, creation of mass organizations, and the nationalization of key industries to fulfill what it understood as the “promises” of the revolution. Yet such assertions render the natural world invisible. We show that a fundamental element of Cárdenas’s ambitious social and political agenda was to rationalize and expand the use of natural resources in tandem with social reform, a process that we term “social landscaping.” The Cardenistas intended not only to reorient the relationship between the popular classes and the state but to unleash state power in order to redefine the relationship between the popular classes and nature. Social landscaping played out in a variety of landscapes such as river valleys, roadways, and forests, the latter of which received special attention. The twin goals of rationalizing resource use and reconfiguring rural people’s relationship with the land, we argue, was a defining characteristic of Cardenismo and its attempt to harness land reform, economic development, and the scientific use of natural resources to the broader project of social transformation.

Los árboles que esconden al bosque: Miguel Ángel de Quevedo y los orígenes de la ciencia forestal en México

“…Este franco fracaso en la formación de personal contrastó con el decidido apoyo que el gobierno cardenista había otorgado a la causa forestal, cuando por fin el Estado mexicano mostraba un rostro distinto al ocuparse de movilizar los recursos naturales y humanos del país, como aseveran Boyer y Wakild (2012). A diferencia de los períodos presidenciales anteriores, en los que el propio Quevedo debía estar solicitando y negociando la atención al asunto, fue el mismo Cárdenas quien lo buscó para dirigir la gestión de los bosques, aun cuando era reconocido su pasado porfirista.…”

The Other Green Revolution: Land Epistemologies and the Mexican Revolutionary State

“…The subject of a rich body of scholarship addressing state formation and class politics, the Mexican Revolution has only begun to come under examination as an event with impacts beyond the human community. Recent works by Boyer (), Boyer and Wakild (), Santiago (), Wakild (), and Wolfe () make an important contribution to this effort, arguing that Revolutionary values and rhetoric made themselves felt in environmental governance that ranged from oil nationalization, forest management and state‐sponsored irrigation. Coining the term “social landscaping” to describe these interventions, Boyer and Wakild (:74) contend that Cardenistas rejected a view of the environment as a “storehouse of natural wealth” in favor of a conception of Mexican ecological health as a critical component of progressive social change.…”

“…In this sense, environmental issues were foundational to the Revolutionary project. Such efforts extended state control into the countryside but did so in a manner constrained and directed by “a popular class energized by years of social upheaval and assembled in institutions such as ejidos, unions, cooperatives, and political organizations capable of making claims on the state and challenging the jurisdiction over natural resources” (Boyer and Wakild :77).…”

“…A new generation of conservationists and bureaucrats would build on Quevedo's conservationist legacy but recast peasants as the solution to rather than the source of the nation's resource challenges, creating a campesino ‐centered program of forest administration. Around the country, state agents helped fund the development of cooperative small‐scale enterprise based on sustainable use of forest resources (Boyer and Wakild :9). The earliest issues of Protección a la Naturaleza , the popular magazine published by the Department of Forestry, Fish and Wildlife, included soil erosion and conservation among its core concerns.…”