Abstract

WALSH, Casey. Region, race and irrigation: development of northern Mexico, 1910-1940. Nueva antropol [online]. 2005, vol.19, n.64, pp.53-73. ISSN 0185-0636.

This article is focused in the study of the Mexican Government strategy, implemented time after the Revolution at northern bordering zone, based in the construction of irrigation systems in the Bravo and Colorado Rivers' feeders, and in colonization of these new agricultural regions. The Government planned to settle several ranchers without lands and migrant workers in order to make them smallholders. This program was based in the widely accepted idea that people from north of Mexico were biological, social and culturally more European than those from the south and center parts of the Country, and therefore, they were retakes considered more likely to receive benefits from development projects. The author Manuel Gamio's texts from the nineteen twenties, concerning Mexican migrants in the United States of America, in order to discuss the conceptual mixture that exists concerning ideas of race and religion. He argues that his ideas were directly or indirectly used in the colonization of the irrigation systems in northern Mexico, where many repatriated people from the United States were settled.

Keywords : race; irrigation system; region; inequity; biological and cultural development.

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