THE JEWELL (wildhorsesthe2nd)

The United States and Mexico, nations long understood on opposing sides of those binary divisions, grappled with strikingly analogous agrarian transformations during the twentieth century. Unprecedented social movements that confronted dispossession and inequality in the countryside shook both nations and both witnessed ruling regimes that intermittently embraced agrarian rebels but abandoned them when politically opportune. In time, each saw the rise of an expert class that sought to wield social and biological science to remake agriculture and rural life. The transformations of the US and Mexican countryside did not merely run parallel, though; they frequently intersected.