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Matthew Vitz, Christopher R. Boyer, editor. A Land between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 902–903, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.902
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There is a notable dearth of environmental histories of Mexico despite the country's complex and dynamic history of human interactions with non-human nature. This book, the first edited collection of essays in English on the environmental history of modern Mexico—defined here as the late eighteenth century to the present—brings together recent, cutting-edge work. As editor Christopher R. Boyer indicates in his introductory chapter, the collection is not intended to be an “encyclopedic approach to the Mexican environment” but rather an “‘invitation’ to Mexican environmental history …presenting a snapshot” of current historiography (p. 14). It does a fine job. Bookended by Boyer's introduction and a conclusion by Cynthia Radding are ten historical case studies by eleven scholars whose research has redefined how we understand environmental and social change in Mexico.
In “The Cycles of Mexican Environmental History,” Boyer argues that Mexico's environmental history is marked by a cyclical pattern of economic expansion, generally reinforced by state centralization, and economic contraction, historically connected to political decentralization. Whereas elite investment and technological advances brought on by increasing state power have induced more intensive uses of nature, economic decline has led to more extensive uses by popular and elite actors under little government direction. Through this interpretation of the nation's environmental history, Boyer seeks to undermine declensionist narratives prevalent in earlier Mexican environmental historiography. As a novel, longue durée approach to the political economy of environmental change, the essay captures a major strand of the case studies that follow. However, it is less effective at explaining how environmental conflict and power have shaped local environments and the appropriation of nature.
