Community, Colonization, and Early Conservation Policy in the Environmental Transformation of the US–Mexico Borderlands

My paper analyzes how capitalist extraction, religious fundamentalism, and settler colonial processes underpinned the transformation of northern Mexico’s surface and ground water, forests, and grasslands from the late 1880s to 1950. My research shows that Mexican diplomats and federal policymakers closely watched the transformation of the U.S. West, with a particular interest in homesteading and arid lands policies. While the Mexican federal government invited in foreign colonization companies and granted generous concessions to foreigners, the state government of Chihuahua experimented with early conservation policies, particularly around timber and water.

A cluster of Mormon colonies in northern Chihuahua became a hub of commerce and agriculture in the rapidly transforming natural and social landscape in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, with transnational linkages to mining, timber, and the railroad. In this paper, I use Mormon colonization in northern Mexico as a case study to explore how ideas about the U.S. West and its natural environment—including Mormonism’s particular notions of empire and working the land—traveled to northern Mexico and how those views transformed the landscape. I apply an environmental justice framework to analyze how Mexican Indigenous and mestizo smallholders engaged with and resisted environmental change and new resource management regimes initiated by settler colonists and the state. Following these communities through the first decades of Mexico’s revolutionary land and environmental policy reform helps to explain how Mormons continued to consolidate wealth and resource concessions despite new rhetoric and policies which promoted land reform and the nationalization of natural resources.