This books embodies one big, interesting idea; a particular, often persuasive, argument; and an impressive, if skewed, array of supportive evidence. It also suffers from exaggerations, omissions and glib assertions. The big idea is that the United States and Mexico are similar: Tore Olsson questions the ‘disciplinary [sic] distinction between “American” and “Latin American” history’, arguing that the American South and rural Mexico ‘share strikingly similar trajectories’ (pp. 9, 192). He makes the case in terms of both direct bilateral connections between the United States and Mexico (the movement of people, ideas and policies) and comparisons – of similar phenomena, like peonage or cash-crop production – which involve no direct connections.
The story is traced from the economic transformations of the late nineteenth century (the Porfiriato, the Gilded Age), through the Mexican Revolution – and the milder agrarian protest of American Populism – to the decisive, shared experience of the Great Depression, which generated both the New Deal and Cardenismo. The coverage of American governmental and philanthropic institutions is more detailed and, perhaps, more cogent: Olsson analyses the ‘agricultural’ and the ‘agrarian’ New Deals, turf wars and personal squabbles, and the well-known story of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). But, given the brief of this journal, I shall focus on the story south of the border, which is the lesser half of the book, both quantitatively and, perhaps, qualitatively.
Olsson usefully examines Mexican espousal – practical and rhetorical – of American ideas and policies; he charts the role of international brokers and boosters who conducted this cross-border traffic (they are repetitiously referred to as ‘pilgrims’ engaged on ‘pilgrimages’: pp. 10, 11, 12, 41, 63, 71, 80, 160, 169, 170, 173, 175, 182); and he shows that this was a ‘dialogue’ rather than a ‘monologue’ (p. 72), i.e., this was two-way traffic. Both the (‘transnational’) approach and the role of relevant actors (individuals like Frank Tannenbaum or institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation) have been well studied; so, as Olsson comments (p. 9), he is broadening an existing track rather than blazing an entirely new trail.
The effort is commendable and the result interesting. But it is often flawed. Olsson dislikes quantitative data (‘dry academic statistics’, pp. 197, 133), even though evaluations of projects – the Green Revolution, the TVA, or its Mexican counterparts, the Papaloapan and Tepalcatepec/Balsas schemes – cry out for statistical evidence regarding both cost and outcome (production, income, welfare). Instead, the author relies on sweeping generalisations and selected obiter dicta. Thus, infrastructure, education, plantations, philanthropic networks, investment, resources and construction are all indiscriminately ‘vast’ (pp. 53, 59, 112, 119, 152, 157, 184, 194). American radicals, tenants, agronomists, insect threats, letters penned by poor southern farmers and Mexican inquiries about the New Deal are all ‘countless’ (pp. 42, 46, 75, 82, 166, 188, 196). ‘Untold tons of earth and concrete’ went into the Papaloapan dams; the acreage of cash-crops in Michoacán ‘skyrocketed’; state social engineering sought to resettle ‘vast multitudes’ (pp. 3, 180, 188). You don't have to be a doctrinaire cliometrician to believe that – when data are available – orders of magnitude are best expressed quantitatively rather than rhetorically; numbers facilitate both comparison – supposedly the purpose of the book – and evaluation (we're told that the TVA ‘made an insubstantial impact on income and wages’ and that the Papaloapan project was ‘largely unsuccessful’, but scarcely a single statistic is cited: pp. 166, 172).
The hyperbole doesn't stop there. Olsson writes in persistently high-octane style. Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution ‘was unparalleled in the history of the Western Hemisphere’; the Depression struck the cotton belt with ‘unmatched ferocity’; Ambassador Josephus Daniels wielded ‘astounding power’ in Mexico; and the ‘meteoric rise’ of hybrid corn in Texas was ‘nothing short of staggering’ (pp. 49, 75–6, 117, 141, 156). Perhaps the Princeton editors could have cooled this authorial ardour: after all, the argument is important and does not need to be raucously shouted from the rooftops. Sometimes, one wonders if Olsson reflects on what he writes. ‘Perhaps no border in history is more iconic in its power of partition than the line bisecting the United States and Mexico’ (p. 1; ‘iconic’, of course, can mean pretty much what you like, but consider – among others – the Berlin Wall and the Korean demilitarised zone …). It's also, he says, a ‘pernicious’ border, since it ‘divides human beings’ (p. 1). So should all borders be abolished? You don't need plumb the depths of know-nothing Trumpism to grasp that a (real) world without borders would be an unholy mess. Weirdest of all, perhaps, in the introductory acknowledgements – where, as usual, the schmaltz really hits the fan – Olsson tells us that he learned more about Mexican ‘history, culture [and] politics’ from his eight ‘research compatriots’ in Mexico City – presumably, young Americans – than from ‘all the books I have ever read’ (p. xii). Which is plainly nonsense, and disproved by his ample and well-thumbed bibliography.
That bibliography affords Olsson a fairly good grasp of the relevant history. He takes a traditional ‘Zapatista’ view of the Revolution, repeatedly invoking – but never defining – the vague notion of peasant ‘communalism’ (pp. 17, 24, 29, 32) and calling Article 27 of the Constitution ‘the fruit of the radical Zapatista wing’, even though no Zapatista took part in its formulation (p. 49). The subsequent Sonoran regime of the 1920s is damned as a ‘conservative interregnum’, during which the Revolution stalled and land reform was ‘symbolic’ or ‘largely rhetorical’ (pp. 30, 32, 37, 94). Consonant with this view, Olsson wrongly calls Alvaro Obregón a ‘large landowner’ (p. 28), when he was a jack-of-all-trades who scraped together the money to buy a small rancho, christened ‘la Quinta Chilla’ (‘Skint Farm’). Olsson thus neglects the precocious land reform which occurred – under President Obregón – in Zapata's state of Morelos; and, referring to US–Mexican relations as ‘extremely icy’ from 1910 to 1932, he ignores the marked thaw which occurred in the late 1920s (p. 86). His description of the US–Mexican border as being ‘hung in a purgatorial state of half war’ through the 1920s is as exaggerated as it is inelegant (p. 87). And the workers of La Laguna were not, in the 1930s, ‘militarised’, but just becoming more militant (pp. 60, 78). When it comes to the wider world, too, Olsson vents some odd views: for example, that 1940s Latin America was full of ‘decolonizing states’, emerging from ‘colonial or neocolonial subjugation’ (pp. 6, 166).
Perhaps the authorial hype derives from an understandable desire to make a historiographical splash. Certainly, Olsson is at pains to dissent from previous historians: a logical and laudable objective, if it is pursued judiciously (as it sometimes is). On occasions, however, the target is traduced: if ‘nearly all accounts’ mistakenly regard Cárdenas as a ‘a nationalist with an agenda restricted to the nation-state’, why are there so many fine studies of his policy towards Spain (p. 74)? Historians are also taken to task for believing that 1940 – the end of the Cárdenas presidency – ‘brought an overnight [sic] … reversal of Cardenismo’ (p. 131); yet no serious historian entertains such a sudden and simplistic view, 1940 being seen, rather, as part of a longer political transition (a view which Olsson shares, pp. 160–1, 169). Such pummelling of straw men is also apparent in Olsson's rebuttal of so-called ‘foreordained’ historical trajectories, to which he prefers ‘unscripted’ processes (whatever they are): bad news for St Augustine, perhaps, but not for the great majority of modern historians of Mexico (pp. 111, 113, 135).
In short, this an interesting, ambitious and original study, which US, Latin American and global historians will learn from; unfortunately, the author too often overcalls his hand and prefers hype to hard evidence.
