Description:

Speaker

Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Title

Hydraulic Erasures: Rivers, Irrigation and Experiment Stations in Northern Mexico and India

Abstract

In the mid 1960s seeds from an experimental station in northern Mexico helped launch the Green Revolution. Use of these high-yielding seeds transformed farming from Latin America to South Asia. Their status as "miracle" seeds was challenged in a few years when excessive use of fertilizer and pesticides wreaked havoc on the environment and had lasting social impacts on farming communities across the globe. While many have written about the Green Revolution and its consequences, this talk seeks to understand how we construct historical narratives of such events. This talk, then, interrogates whose narratives are erased and which survive by examining the historical contexts of overshadowed histories of the so-called Green Revolution.