Agrarian Crossings by Olsson Tore C

Author:Olsson, Tore C. [Olsson, Tore C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691165202
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2017-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.2. Lázaro Cárdenas, Henry A. Wallace, and Marte R. Gómez touring the Rockefeller crop test plots at Chapingo, September 1946. Archivo Hermanos Mayo, envelope 225. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación.

Nothing better evoked the Rockefeller program’s smallholder sympathies and alliance with revolutionary Mexico than a symbolic visit to Chapingo in 1946 from two legendary agrarian icons: Lázaro Cárdenas and Henry Wallace. Orchestrated by Mann, the reunion testified to the fusion of transnational political ideologies that had initially given birth to the MAP. Wallace, then secretary of commerce under Harry Truman, was eager to return to Mexico after his 1940 tour and accepted Mann’s invitation.65 Cárdenas, having never visited the ongoing project, was equally curious.66 On September 7, Wallace, Cárdenas, and agriculture chief Gómez convened in Chapingo. The three men—the agrarian New Deal’s foremost champion, the immortalized patron of Mexico’s land reform, and the former Zapatista—together walked the grounds of the Rockefeller Foundation’s experiment station. In the test plots where synthetic maize was being grown for distribution to ejido farmers, Cárdenas and Wallace heard of the unconventional breeding strategies pursued by the foundation’s staff. Wallace recalled in his diary that “most of the corn-belt inbred strains of corn are not adapted to Mexican conditions”; Cárdenas similarly expressed marvel at the promise of “this class of crops.”67

The 1946 meeting of Cárdenas, Wallace, and Gómez in Chapingo’s synthetic maize field represented the high-water mark of the early green revolution. Up to that point, the Rockefeller Foundation’s intervention in Mexican agriculture had sought to democratize the fruits of modern agronomy—a mission born from the lessons of the US South and guided in no small part by the social ideologies of those three distinguished visitors: the agrarian New Deal, Mexican agrarismo, and the marriage of science and revolutionary politics. But rather than marking a new chapter in socially conscious rural reform, the symbolic reunion of 1946 represented a closing of the book. Agrarian activism in both countries was then waning, not waxing. Just ten days after Wallace returned from Mexico, he was dismissed from his commerce post for challenging Truman’s Cold War entrenchment with the Soviet Union; it was the last political appointment Wallace would ever hold. By year’s end, Gómez too stood outside the halls of government, removed from his post by the incoming presidential administration of Miguel Alemán (1946–52). And although Cárdenas’s idolization among rural Mexicans would hardly diminish, the ejido experiment that he had long nursed saw its future imperiled during the increasingly conservative Alemán years.

As the political fortunes of Wallace, Cárdenas, and Gómez declined precipitously in the coming years, the peasant sympathies of the MAP followed their trajectory. That shift grew from internal and external pressures. Thrust into an escalating Cold War that rapidly polarized geopolitics, Rockefeller philanthropy sought to dovetail its work with the US State Department’s global agenda. Within Mexico, the revolutionary ruling party under Alemán decisively turned its back on questions of rural social justice to favor food security for the nation’s growing cities. Confronting

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