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Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside. By Tore C. Olsson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 296 pp., $35.00, hardback, ISBN 978-0-691-16520-2.
"Borders matter," Tore Olsson reminds us at the start of Agrarian Crossings, a compelling narrative of agrarian reform in Mexico and the United States that shows that what matters most about borders is sometimes their porousness. In the 1930s and early 1940s, both countries witnessed significant "state-led rural reform along with its attendant social upheaval" (3). In Mexico, the populist president Lázaro Cárdenas initiated a program of land reform that redistributed nearly fifty million acres in the pursuit of greater independence and prosperity for peasant farmers. Meanwhile, in the United States, the New Deal promised by Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to alleviate rural poverty, particularly in the South, through a barrage of programs and policies. As Olsson convincingly demonstrates, the development and execution of these radical agrarian reform efforts involved countless cross-border comparisons. Many observers, including a few very influential ones, saw commonalities between the plight of campesinos in Mexico and that of tenant farmers of the southern United States and sought to learn from...