Magueys and Machines: Narratives of Environmental Change in Mid-Twentieth-Century Mexico

Introduction​

It was 1962, decades after the Mexican Revolution. Over those decades, a growing body of novels, films, and murals focused on how the revolutionary event had come to decisively mark the country’s cultural production.¹ A young filmmaker launched his first experimental film, in which spiky, leathery maguey plants (Agave americana or American aloe), filmed in the state of Tlaxcala, wage an uncanny vegetal battle that results in devastated fields followed by the rebirth of a prosperous crop of magueys. The same year, a well-established novelist who had been governor of the state of Jalisco during the previous decade published a novel about the delicate, often painful process of agricultural modernization in a locality all but forgotten by Álvaro Obregón’s government in the postrevolutionary moment of the early 1920s. The film is Los magueyes, by Rubén Gámez, and the novel is Las tierras flacas (The Lean Lands, 1968), by Agustín Yáñez.²

At first, the film and the novel may seem strikingly dissimilar. They are set in different areas with different agricultural histories, by authors at diametrically opposed points in their careers. They also address contrasting sets of aesthetic concerns. Gámez’s experimental style blends nonhuman characters and a prominent use of soundtrack as a narrative device to focus on a crop that, albeit evoking iconic images of the Mexican countryside, was already declining in production. Yáñez, by contrast, draws on the realism so prominent in the tradition of the novelas de la Revolución—a tradition to which he himself had decisively contributed fifteen years earlier with Al filo del agua (1947; The Edge of the Storm, 1963)—in a novel permeated by local sayings and traditions conveyed largely through free indirect discourse.³ With Las tierras flacas, Yáñez turned his attention to agricultural modernization in the Jaliscian smallholding economy of the ranchos.

Two factors tie these works together. The first are their intense reflections on the transformations that Mexican agriculture underwent in the 1940s and 1950s. Starting with the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) in 1943, the introduction of improved seeds, new machinery, and new fertilizers and pesticides was the beginning of the process later known as the Green Revolution, which changed the scale, ecological conditions, and labor relations of food production, and the access to land associated with it, on a global level. Although neither Los magueyes nor Las tierras flacas address the MAP or the Green Revolution in explicit terms, both reverberate with the effects, promises, and anxieties stemming from the reconfigurations of agricultural production. The modernization of agricultural methods had been a concern for decades prior to the MAP, but I contend that the program constituted a landmark in understanding the specific wave of agricultural changes that serves as a background for the two works analyzed here. In other words, the Green Revolution that began with the MAP was at the heart of the “ecological unconscious” of these works, to borrow Kerstin Oloff’s term mentioned below.⁴ The second factor tying these works together is their textual alignment with the novelas de la Revolución mexicana, either by portraying open, “armed” conflict among maguey plants, or the agricultural transformations in the post-Revolution years.⁵ Both works, I argue, expand and rewrite themes associated with revolutionary narratives in order to explore perceptions of and reactions to mid-twentieth-century agricultural transformations, largely in enthusiastic terms but sometimes with sinister undertones.

By examining these factors, this article proposes that Los magueyes and Las tierras flacas use the familiar conventions and motifs of revolutionary narratives as a template, in Ursula K. Heise’s terms, to dramatize contemporaneous environmental transformations taking place in different parts of the country.⁶ They came out shortly after the codification of the novelas de la Revolución took a decisive turn with the 1960 publication of the anthology La novela de la Revolución mexicana, edited by Antonio Castro Leal.⁷ A commercial success reprinted numerous times, this anthology not only helped keep the genre alive in readers’ minds but also established a more precise canon. Even when openly trying to break with the traditions of these stories of the Revolution, as Los magueyes does, the film and the novel activate their narrative expectations about armed conflict, battlefields, social and agrarian inequality, and labor exploitation—as well as the sense of hope and utopia often present in revolutionary narratives and in their critical reception—in order to render mid-twentieth-century agricultural transformations culturally visible.⁸

This article contributes to the reassessment of narratives of the Mexican Revolution, both in literature and film, through the lenses of ecocritical studies. Although environmental issues have not traditionally been part of the critical corpus on the novelas de la Revolución, recent work has paid attention to the role of the nonhuman world in the genre. Mark D. Anderson reads Al filo del agua through Adorno and Horkheimer’s take on the domination and revolt of nature.⁹ Carolyn Fornoff analyzes human and nonhuman interactions in Rafael F. Muñoz’s Se llevaron el cañón para Bachimba (1941; They Took the Cannon to Bachimba).¹⁰ In both cases, desertification and land erosion are environmental concerns that, as the authors show, are significantly more present in the genre than previously thought. Closer to the arguments that “Magueys and Machines” develops, Oloff reads Pedro Páramo as a gothic representation of the Green Revolution’s rural exploitation.¹¹ If, as Oloff proposes, “the anxieties that the gothic mode registers thus revolve around reorganizations of nature-society relations,” the forms of environmental awareness implied by Pedro Páramo’s gothic tropes make visible what Oloff classifies, paraphrasing Fredric Jameson, as an “ecological unconscious.”¹² In dialogue with these critics, I contend that the genre of the revolutionary narrative has an environmental dimension that provides crucial insight both into the environmental implications and impact of the Revolution as narrated in many works belonging to the genre, and on the larger spectrum of environmental issues contemporaneous with the development and canonization of the novela de la Revolución in later decades.

In this article, thus, I aim to show that later revolutionary narratives encompass a spectrum of environmental transformations broader than that attached to the revolutionary period itself. In other words, to read the genre from the critical lens of the environmental humanities means not only to take into account the environmental factors causing, enabling, and obfuscating armed conflict, but also to understand these works as arenas where larger concerns about the environment, including agricultural production, were being debated. This is especially visible in some works of the 1950s and 1960s that not only maintain a keen relation to the revolutionary tradition, but that also embed, in their take on that tradition, considerations about contemporaneous environmental factors. In order to do so, I investigate the literary echo of the Green Revolution in narratives on the Mexican Revolution in order to show how, unlike novels such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), Los magueyes and Las tierras flacas offer a more welcoming take on the potentially positive economic effects of such agricultural changes.¹³ Although Las tierras flacas is somewhat ambivalent about the politics of agricultural management, this novel and Los magueyes reinforce the ideals of rural prosperity that revolutionary narratives so commonly showcase.¹⁴ In their focus on how such transformations have affected human and nonhuman forms of life, these works explore the logic of neocoloniality behind the Green Revolution, a phenomenon that both embrace for the most part, even as they leave space for more ambivalent positions. As such, both works are exemplary of a reinvention of revolutionary themes within the framework of mid-twentieth-century developmentalism. They do so through an approach to agricultural modernization that comments on the present of the 1960s by activating the tropes of a genre in the process of systematization and that, consequently, invites a reconsideration of what is at stake when the novelas de la Revolución are read ecocritically.

The Mexican Agricultural Program

The so-called Green Revolution had a profound impact on food production in Mexico and a number of other countries in the mid-twentieth century through the development and distribution of hybrid seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, and the introduction of advanced machinery in agriculture. In the case of Mexico, these changes were coupled with an increased use of irrigation methods, some of them developed by the government. The Mexican Agricultural Program began as a partnership among the Mexican and American governments and the Rockefeller Foundation following U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace’s visit to Mexico. The MAP sent U.S. scientists to Mexico in order to improve agricultural productivity through research, which was carried out in conjunction with the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería. In this initial stage, the program began in a limited fashion. It received some land and personnel to develop laboratories, including its main headquarters in Chapingo, which became the International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement (CIMMYT) in 1966.¹⁵

From its early years, the program had two objectives. The first was to eradicate hunger and fight poverty by investing in crops traditionally tied to subsistence in Mexico, most notably corn. As Olsson shows, the scientists whom the MAP recruited were, for the most part, sensitive to the specificities of the country and not simply eager to import U.S. methods.¹⁶ The second objective, however, was more in line with the development of Mexican agriculture for international export—which privileged wheat—in order to help the country industrialize, especially during the presidency of Miguel Alemán (1946-1952).¹⁷ The two crops on which the MAP’s research focused, corn and wheat, thus reflected this double objective.¹⁸

Another basic goal of the MAP was to develop insecticides. This effort relied on widespread use of DDT and was undertaken by a team of entomologists committed to killing a variety of common plagues and diseases. The use of pesticides, which Rachel Carson had already denounced in the United States in Silent Spring (1962), would be key to later criticism of the program.¹⁹ Further chemical interventions mostly relied on nitrogen- and phosphorous-based fertilizers capable of improving crop quality. As Romina Robles Ruvalcaba shows, the use of fertilizers and initiatives to dig wells were the most common effects of such transformations in the broader region where Las tierras flacas is set.²⁰ Ultimately, advancing research was difficult, and small farmers and ejidatarios resisted improved seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, as Yáñez shows in his novel, due to the fact that they had to depend on third parties for continuous access to such resources in order to maintain their productivity. All this led to the privileging of wheat as the MAP’s centerpiece in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Under the leadership of Norman Borlaug, the program took hold quickly in larger commercial farms, especially in northern Mexico.²¹ This model gradually replaced small and communal farms causing an exodus from rural areas and the widespread concentration of land ownership into fewer hands.

Through exhibitions, informative pamphlets, and technical bulletins, the MAP fostered a narrative of agrarian modernization via a range of traditional motifs that took different forms depending on the audience.²² For a Mexican audience, most specifically rural workers who might use the program’s hybrid seeds, the idea of modernization was folded into a positive portrayal of campesinos through traditional imagery and an implicit defense of ranchos and ejidos. For a foreign audience, however, the MAP emphasized the contrast between a Mexican agriculture trapped in primitive methods and the revolutionary potential of technology. While critics such as agronomist Jesús Uribe Ruiz contended that the MAP “deformed and even worse de-Mexicanized agricultural research,” the cultural production of the 1950s and 1960s represented agricultural modernity through myriad lenses, and usually in positive terms.²³

Los Magueyes

It was during this period of change that Rubén Gámez’s Los magueyes came out. The 9-minute film, produced with scarce resources by Gustavo Alatriste and the director himself, was shot over the course of two years, “on the days the great photographer [Gámez] could steal from his day job,” before its release in 1962.“²⁴ Los magueyes garnered an enthusiastic reception, with newspaper articles that also documented audiences’ reactions in theaters offering favorable comments on it.²⁵ This first film by Gámez paved the way for his most well-known work, La fórmula secreta (1964, The Secret Formula), a 45-minute film with original text by Juan Rulfo. La fórmula secreta won the Primer Concurso de Cine Experimental del Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica de la República Mexicana and became a landmark in the small experimental cinema scene of the period.²⁶ Gámez’s production in the 1960s can be characterized as an attempt to reformulate the notion of Mexican identity to account for the impact of perceived icons of modernization—the “secret formula” refers to Coca-Cola’s recipe—on traditional tropes widely mobilized in Mexican postrevolutionary cultural production.²⁷ In Gámez’s words, “[m]i pretensión [con La fórmula secreta] es crear realmente un cine mexicano, el mexicano de Rulfo.”“²⁸ Such a quest for a “truly Mexican cinema” included a thorough reconfiguration of the aesthetics of the época de oro of Mexican cinema, which had been in decline for over a decade, under the rubric of experimentalism.²⁹

Los magueyes tells a tale of war, conflict, and death among magueys, before their rebirth as a harmonic field. There are no humans, animals, or any other “characters” or notable elements beyond apparently infinite fields of magueys. Images of maguey leaves piercing and tearing each other, with dazzling, labyrinthine takes of numerous bushes in a frenzy of war to the soundtrack of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, dominate the first part of the film.³⁰ After a few minutes of images of shredded magueys in a devastated battlefield, a living maguey reappears in all its magnificence. The film’s final minutes zoom out on views of maguey fields composed of perfectly ordered, harmonious rows, closing with all-encompassing aerial shots of the magueys and the mountain tops beyond.

It is symptomatic that the plant chosen by Gámez was the maguey. Beyond the dramatic contours of its leaves, its sharp edges, and its imposing figure, the maguey was widely used as “part of a national visual grammar.”³¹ Los magueyes was likely shot in an area known as the Llanos de Apan, a tri-state region including parts of Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, and México that had been the epicenter of maguey production since the late nineteenth century. In the Llanos de Apan, monocultures of maguey pulquero—that is, magueys used to produce pulque, a fermented beverage widely popular in Mexico until mid-twentieth century—greatly expanded during Porfírio Díaz’s dictatorship, especially from 1890 to 1910.³² After suffering a decline in productivity during the revolutionary period, the Llanos de Apan’s production rebounded in the 1930s and took place in post-Agrarian Reform communal lands known as ejidos. From the mid-twentieth century on, maguey production decreased steadily due to pulque’s dwindling popularity.³³

The magueys’ prevalence in Mexico’s central plateau and their stunning appearance gave them a prominent place in iconographies and accounts of the Mexican countryside before and after the Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, as Hernández and Ramírez show, the maguey agroindustry was also an important component of how foreign travelers perceived, photographed, and narrated Mexico.³⁴ In post-revolutionary cinema, the images of maguey fields in Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México!, shot in 1931, arguably influenced Gámez himself in the production of Los magueyes.³⁵ However, contrary to Gámez’s film, in which humans are completely absent from the magueys’ dramatic battles, Eisenstein’s magueys are notably domesticated by human hands: there are scenes of people walking among the magueys and extracting aguamiel for the production of pulque. The basic mode in which magueys participate in the film is as the background for human actions. While Eisenstein’s film does serve as the basis for cinematic tropes of maguey fields, it does not assign any form of protagonism to the plants themselves, much less the polysemic role that the magueys play in Los magueyes, in which the plant can be understood as an allegory of human actions as well as an object of humans’ environmental impact.

Allegorical interpretations are nearly unavoidable: the maguey war alludes to the Mexican Revolution and its momentarily dire consequences, followed by the rebirth of a modern nation yearning for a bright, peaceful future. In this case, Los magueyes would be but one experimental title in a large body of films portraying the Revolution. As an allegory of the revolution, it is in fact a conventional one: contrary to the ambivalence about the reasons for the Revolution and about its leaders and outcomes that is present across novelas de la Revolución, Los magueyes presents a highly uncritical, laudatory view of the Revolution as a tale of war, recovery, and prosperity.

However, this all-too-easy allegorical interpretation of the film eclipses the fact that, taken literally, it also narrates a tale of agricultural modernization. This is the reading I want to propose here: at a moment when Mexican agriculture was undergoing an unprecedented transformation as ground zero of the Green Revolution, Los magueyes captures a sense of the transformation and expansion of agricultural production. It does so by centering the emblematic figure of the maguey, which strongly conveys a Mexican flavor but is, ironically, a commodity that, albeit associated with modern techniques at the turn of the twentieth century during the Porfiriato, was not a priority for the MAP. Rather than merely a celebratory allegory of the Mexican Revolution, Los magueyes also serves as an allegory of the Green Revolution and, more broadly, of the Anthropocene itself. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey demonstrates, allegory has been a primary mode through which the Anthropocene, the possible new geological epoch in which humans have become geological agents, is culturally expressed and perceived. Rather than insisting on the planetary scale implied by the Anthropocene, DeLoughrey argues, a study of such cultural expressions should shift to smaller, more local contexts: “To parochialize the Anthropocene is to uncover its place-based allegories.”³⁶ Such an allegorical effect is achieved through a striking contrast between the camera’s movements in the first and the second parts of Los magueyes.

In the first part, Gámez’s camera strives to erase the sense of orderly rows. Maguey plants are filmed from below or from between the rows, or they face the camera in a close shot. When the camera moves, it often does so from below or slightly above the plants, as if from the point of view of a train or an animal walking alongside them—in other words, still very close to the plants themselves. The numerous close-ups of the plants and their spears create the impression of individual personality and action. The scenes of “battle,” in which spears pierce the leaves of other magueys or suddenly emerge from the side of the screen, as threatening swords, intensifies the effect of individual agency and lack of collective coordination. For the battle these magueys fight seems close to a visceral, spontaneous paroxysm of rage that echoes a larger history of violence.³⁷ In fact, Gámez goes to great lengths to erase an organized view of the actual rows of magueys he shoots: the few takes from above in the film’s first part move at a transversal angle to the rows, so as to blur the sense of symmetry the rows would otherwise convey and present the plants as if they were randomly spread around the field.

In contrast, the film’s second part is mostly composed of wide-angle shots that highlight the orderliness of the maguey rows. After a few minutes that show the “battlefield” with shredded magueys scattered around and a faint fire in the background, the last two minutes reveal their rebirth by highlighting one surviving maguey, shot from above. The last minute completes the process of resurrection: this shot of one plant gives way to broader and broader shots of multiple magueys, distributed in orderly rows, while a sequence of shots zooms out to show larger and larger tracts of land with rows clearly separated one from each other. In the last scene, the magueys are themselves barely distinguishable. The long rows of the cultivated field occupy most of the screen and form a harmonious landscape with a range of hills and the sky in the background.³⁸

During this transition, Shostakovich’s symphony shifts from a martial chant to a triumphal ode. Composed in 1957 to commemorate Russia’s October Revolution of 1905, the Eleventh Symphony “programmatically represented the 1905 Bloody Sunday Massacre [and] became inordinately famous, inspiring transcriptions for various media.”³⁹ Thus, by giving portions of the symphony’s second and fourth movements a central role in setting the film’s tone and theme, Gámez deepens the historical breadth of Los magueyes, turning it into a meditation on revolutionary events beyond Mexico. Moreover, the use of a piece that was composed only five years before the film—and that could well be seen as a “comment on the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising” in 1956—brings the film’s content into conversation with a broader realm of mid-century concerns contemporaneous with the Green Revolution.⁴⁰

Through the rationalization of production in large-scale agriculture, the quintessential figure of the maguey is refashioned so as to form the basis for a modern agriculture, culminating in the final wide-angle shots of magueys that are no longer individually visible. As a result, the sense of individual action conveyed throughout the first part of the film is lost as the magueys are incorporated into the collective body of agricultural production. As mentioned above, magueys were not a crop favored by MAP scientists, yet, it is telling that, in his experimental revolutionary drama, Gámez opted for a tale of agricultural modernization in order to reflect on what postrevolutionary Mexico would look like. If, according to Adela Pineda Franco, non-Mexican cinema on the Revolution from the 1940s to the 1970s makes visible “the vast hermeneutical potential of the Mexican Revolution’s visual archive to trigger political interest beyond Mexico,” Los magueyes activates the same potential for exploring agricultural interests that extend not only beyond Mexico, but also beyond the human.⁴¹ Through a traditional crop, the film captures how the Green Revolution transformed food production mindsets by narrating the plants’ gradual loss of individuality as they are incorporated into large-scale monocultures. The film potentially allegorizes both the Mexican Revolution and the changes underway due to the MAP’s actions. More broadly, in a moment in which the Anthropocene as a concept has been steadily moving beyond the geological sciences to acquire a growing presence in cultural and academic production in the Humanities and Social Sciences, this retrospective gaze at how the Anthropocene has been narrated in previous decades allows for a reassessment of humans’ environmental impact in works like Los magueyes that dramatize some of the implications of the Anthropocene before the term was created.

Las tierras flacas

Albeit set in the early 1920s, decades before the agricultural changes discussed here became prevalent, Las tierras flacas reflects issues that were pressing in the 1940s and 1950s in its depiction of the period between the Revolution and the Cristero war. One of Yáñez’s main objectives as governor of Jalisco was to dismantle the power and political influence of local caciques who—as Las tierras flacas as well as his previous novel, La tierra pródiga (1960, The Prodigal Land), show—contributed to economic stagnation and, according to Yáñez, worked against Jaliscian grandeza (greatness) and prevented a true democracy from flourishing.⁴² Las tierras flacas narrates the golden years and decay of one of those caciques, Epifanio Trujillo, as his hold over the land is replaced by the modernization efforts of his estranged son, Jacob Gallo, who very clearly represents state presence and the desire for a modern Mexico. Through Gallo’s proposals, agricultural terms widely used in the context of the Green Revolution are transposed onto life in rural Jalisco in the 1920s.

Like Yáñez’s most famous novel, Al filo del agua, Las tierras flacas narrates the upheaval of pueblos and rural areas in the Altos de Jalisco region in the early stages of agricultural modernization.⁴³ While Al filo del agua takes place on the eve of the revolution in 1910, Las tierras flacas leaps over the revolutionary decade to focus on the early 1920s, during Álvaro Obregón’s presidency. In both novels, however, drought is a serious issue that threatens and reorganizes forms of life. The characters in the first novel face a “severe drought [that] lasted through August into September, an unheard-of thing, which made God’s anger manifest.”⁴⁴ The lean lands of the second novel underscore a “land [that] gets stonier and harder [every year], and it’s no good letting it lie fallow for a season or two or even longer. And the sky as well, less rainfall every year, more uneven and more deceptive.”⁴⁵ The imminent revolution in the first novel is, as Anderson proposes, also a “revolt of nature” against drought and desertification. “As the novel’s title suggests,” continues Anderson, “the storm lies just over the horizon and its fury will bring both destruction and renewal, ending the drought and delivering social and spiritual rejuvenation.”⁴⁶ The event of the storm, allegorically standing for the Revolution but also ecologically grounded in the context of a region experiencing intermittent droughts, is independent of human action, but will nevertheless affect humans and nonhumans alike—just as the Mexican Revolution did. In Las tierras flacas, the redemptive power of natural forces is not enough: there is no single storm capable of ending Tierra Santa’s suffering. Instead, irrigation, machinery, and improved seeds must do that.⁴⁷ From the early years of the Green Revolution, when Al filo del agua came out, to its triumph in the so-called Mexican Miracle, which characterized the atmosphere when Las tierras flacas was published, the ecological problem that persists across both novels bifurcates into two different views of nonhuman narrative agency. In the later novel, a rhetoric similar to that of the MAP prevails: to make Mexico prosperous, its land had to be controlled by human forces under the aegis of modernization.

The fifteen years that separate the publication of the two novels are marked by Yáñez’s decision to pause his literary career in favor of his political one: he served as governor of Jalisco from 1953 to 1959—a key period for the expansion of the methods fostered by the Green Revolution.⁴⁸ Deeply committed to dismantling the power of local caciques, of whom the character of Epifanio Trujillo is a telling example, Yáñez, according to Robles Ruvalcaba, “aimed [at an ambitious transformation of the countryside] by reviving liberal ideology and the idea of democracy with the smallholding as its legitimizing, concretizing, principle.”⁴⁹ The smallholding to which Robles refers is the rancho, which became not only a much more widespread form of land tenure from the 1940s on, but one of the types of smallholding that, in Jalisco, most deeply adopted the Green Revolution’s methods.⁵⁰ Ranchos are also the basic land units that make up the setting of Las tierras flacas; bringing irrigation to them, as Jalisco did in the 1950s, was a direct way of intervening in what Yáñez himself described, in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo, as “the big drama those people face[, which] is that they are not safe from the sky, and the soil is eroded.”⁵¹ The predicament of agricultural production in regions such as Jalisco’s Caxcana, where Tierra Santa is presumably located, set the problems that Yáñez the governor attempted to solve and that Yáñez the writer would later expose. This is also what happens in La tierra pródiga, published shortly after his tenure as governor and dealing with the tyrannies of caciquismo on Jalisco’s coast.⁵² While the earlier novel is set in the 1950s and responds to concrete issues Yáñez faced as governor, the later one, set in the 1920s, refracts the 1950s.^{53, 54, 55, 56, 57} This multitemporal dimension is what makes Las tierras flacas such an intriguing exercise in how to embed the Green Revolution’s effects in a larger history of the symbolic construction of post-revolutionary Mexico.⁵⁸

Beyond the family conflicts, endless traditional sayings, and episodes of rural life that occupy a significant portion of the plot,Las tierras flacas narrates the transition from forms of production based on rudimentary methods during the time of the cacique to the arrival of new agricultural technologies coupled with a more thorough integration into regional and national political spheres. This transition, materialized in the novel in the dichotomy between “the Land or the Machine” (“la tierra o la máquina”) that names the first part of the book, permeates the plot’s most basic opposition and is repeated by Yáñez in equally schematic terms, for example, in his interview with Carballo.[55] Jacobo Gallo’s return to Tierra Santa after years amassing his fortune elsewhere, including “trips to the North,” suggest that business connections in the United States mark the beginning of a revolution in the region’s way of life and potential for production.[56] “I have enough means to save the plain from want,” he announces[57]. Eager to invest in the region and replace his estranged father with a form of leadership more similar to that of the old cacique than he would like to acknowledge, Gallo and his sons spend most of the plot convincing the rancheros to adopt improvements such as:

Some of these measures receive special praise as they are implemented. Irrigation and water management, for example, are key issues: “New words and fresh rumors added to the astonishment: ‘artesian well,’ ‘weather vane.’ One of the new words coming into circulation, ‘cistern,’ sounded like a caress on eager ears and tongues.”[59] The “improved seeds” mentioned above are also pivotal: “Another surprise, a big one, was the marvelous yield of the cornfields treated with fertilizer and sown with good seed compared with the chronic sickliness of the others; the former were so sturdy that they withstood the June hailstorms, which also seemed miraculous.”⁶⁰

Also perceived as miraculous was the arrival of electricity, promised throughout the novel: “Electricity! The word is exciting. Jacob also says he will bring it before the rainy season, and there will be light bulbs.”⁶¹ The novel closes, indeed, with the arrival of electricity in Tierra Santa, in a carefully arranged spectacle briefly savored by the local population before, ironically, a storm begins: “Jacob and those with him climbed hastily onto the platform, and the current was turned on at once. As the strings of bulbs lit up, the exclamation of surprise was unanimous . . . . Another flash of lightning shone, followed by a furious clap of thunder. One by one, big and heavy, the first drops of rain began to fall.”⁶² The translation replaces “tostones” by “heavy,” thus omitting the reference to this type of coin. While the storm seems to interfere with the spectacle, it also complements it: the raindrops, compared to coins and thus associated with money, are essential for fueling agriculture. Their appearance, synchronized with the arrival of electrical light, suggests a convergence of factors through which the rancheros’ frightening dependence on the capriciousness of natural events is finally overcome and nature’s power harnessed for their needs. The very lightning, an electric discharge from the sky at the moment electricity is presented to the people, reinforces in almost caricatural terms the association between the mastery of natural forces and progress.

Some of the improvements that Jacob Gallo brings did take place in the early 1920s and are noted by Yáñez himself in other works, such as his account of September 15, 1920 and the arrival of electricity in Yahualica, the Jaliscian town where his family owned a plot of land.⁶³ Taken together, however, the modernizing measures that Gallo implements are akin to the technologies and policies not of the 1920s, but instead those from the 1930s on, and especially the 1940s and 1950s. There seems to be a certain disjuncture between the time when the novel is set and many of the issues—especially the agricultural and environmental ones—it addresses.⁶⁴ More than sheer anachronism, this structure ties together the motifs of narratives about the Revolution and its aftermath, on the one hand, and the intense transformations taking place in the country when Yáñez wrote this novel, on the other. This multitemporal structure allows the novel to reflect on the Green Revolution at the same time as it revisits and reactivates themes associated with the novelas de la Revolución.⁶⁵

Airplanes, electricity, agricultural machinery, and other technologies are, however, not easily accepted by the inhabitants of Tierra Santa. In fact, a number of passages narrate Gallo’s and his family’s efforts to assuage the fears of local people who often see airplanes as flying devils, “the terrifying appearance of the devil, Satan, in the guise of a flying monster, causing death wherever he passed above the farms of the Tierra Santa.”⁶⁶ Likewise, they consider other technologies as potentially devilish things or traps that Gallo has set in an effort to become another cacique: a delayed storm is a “[sign] that it would be a bad year . . . . This seemed to confirm the belief that electricity and the other products of witchcraft brought by the Gallos would be the ruin of the Tierra Santa. Jacobo was indeed a Mason, a Protestant, an enemy of Christianity.”⁶⁷ The malefic connotations of such technologies contrast the divine power of one machine: the sewing machine of the deceased Teófila, the daughter of protagonists Rómulo and Merced who is increasingly perceived as a local saint. The novel’s ongoing conflict is based on her parents’ struggle to prevent her machine from being taken by the cacique Epifanio. Teófila’s sainthood is progressively associated with the machine, which becomes “the relic.”⁶⁸ The machine’s instrumentality, however, is often effaced in favor of an almost mystical representation of it: la máquina. In fact, over the course of many chapters in which “the machine” is a major source of conflict, the reader is not even informed of what kind of machine it is or what it does.

In addition to this erasure of the sewing machine’s instrumentality, airplanes fly over Tierra Santa but never really carry any of its inhabitants and many of Jacobo’s technologies initially seem to have no purpose. All these factors indicate that the inhabitants of Tierra Santa view technology, not as a means to an end, but as a cause for astonishment that can only be explained by miracles and devils. The “superstitious character of the region” does indeed support the dichotomy between primitive and modern that Yáñez seeks to explore.⁶⁹ But a mere characterization of the pueblo’s reaction as idle superstition is not enough to explain the implications of the technological changes in Tierra Santa.⁷⁰

In 1954, less than a decade before the publication of Las tierras flacas, another powerful reflection on how technology affects human relationships with natural resources had been published. In analyzing, for example, the impact of hydroelectricity or mechanized agriculture in Germany, Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” insists that the essence of modern technology is not something technological, but rather a way of revealing “the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”⁷¹ Standing-reserve is the condition in which natural resources and machines present themselves in a state of instrumental potentiality. Yáñez’s approach to the troubling presence of modern technology in the countryside dramatizes Tierra Santa’s characters’ resistance to enframing their reality as standing-reserve.⁷² The sewing machine, the airplane, and other technologies ought to be seen as standing-reserve, but the de-objectified view many characters hold of the sewing machine and the airplane pushes back against their potential instrumentality. By opening the story with this de-instrumentalized, increasingly sacred machine, Yáñez develops a mode of narrative perception that not only encompasses the sewing machine per se, but also sets a much more conflicted tone for the story of how Tierra Santa’s inhabitants reconfigure natural resources through modern technology than a mere fable of modernization would involve.

The multitemporal dimension of Las tierras flacas dramatizes the clash between the characters’ skepticism about technology’s abilities to increase crop yields and forecast the weather, on the one hand, and the belief in technological improvements, on the other. By placing the novel in an earlier period and painting the characters’ reactions to airplanes, machines, and electricity in ambivalent tones, Yáñez aligns the larger tradition of narratives about revolutionary topics with an optimistic view of the impact of new technologies in rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, the novel’s highly dialogical structure allows the characters’ feelings and fears to be acknowledged and appreciated. As such, machinery, improved seeds, reforestation, irrigation, and other changes are presented as the right, indeed almost inevitable, path for curing Tierra Santa’s problems as they are gradually incorporated into the cultural imaginary of postrevolutionary Mexico.

Conclusion

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the novelas de la Revolución were organized into a recognizable corpus, as previously noted. In the cinematic arena, the época de oro of Mexican cinema had exhaustively explored revolutionary topics over the preceding decades. In this sense, Los magueyes and Las tierras flacas are not merely latecomers, but instead works that dialogue with a familiar and highly accessible set of themes and tropes. While they do reverberate with the ambivalence of revolutionary narratives, they also mobilize another set of expectations in more sympathetic ways. These were expectations of expanding agricultural production using the technologies of the Green Revolution.

At first, neither the film nor the novel may appear as commentaries on the Green Revolution: Gámez chose as protagonist a plant notably associated with earlier agricultural forms in Los magueyes, and Las tierras flacas is set in the 1920s. Even if these works comment on the Green Revolution, they would not have been able to predict the negative effects—such as land concentration, further erosion, contamination, and dependence on agrochemicals—that these transformations would come to entail. Nevertheless, both explore the novelty of and enthusiasm for the large-scale monoculture and agricultural technologies being implemented in the period. While Gámez’s camera performs the shift from more spontaneous crops to highly rationalized, controlled fields, Yáñez documents the reaction of smallholding farmers to technologies strikingly similar to those that the Mexican Agricultural Program developed, thus showcasing the breakdown of the opposition between la tierra y la máquina. By different means, both works express a certain degree of optimism regarding the narratives of progress and development surrounding these changes. At the same time, they formally allow some ambiguity to remain latent through the increasing crop planting in larger fields in the case of Gámez and through the doubts and fears that Tierra Santa’s inhabitants voice in the polyphonic narrative of Las tierras flacas. As such, these works can be read as bridges to the developmentalist mindset of the second half of the twentieth century while, at the same time, they refract revolutionary themes and concerns. By integrating such dilemmas into narratives that ultimately celebrate agricultural and economic growth, the two works broaden the temporal and ecological scope of the tradition of revolutionary narratives and invite a reconsideration of the genre that not only takes into consideration its environmental component, but a larger environmental history that reverberates across works.⁷³

Victoria Saramago is associate professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literatures and cultures with a focus on the environmental humanities and the energy humanities. Her award-winning book, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America, was published in 2021 by Northwestern University Press. She has also co-edited the Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (De Gruyter, 2023) and Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge, 2022).