Alejandro Tortolero Villasenor

Alejandro Tortolero Villasenor is history Professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa (México). His research focus on agrarian history and the economic history of natural resources in México. His books include De la Coa a la Máquina de Vapor: Actividad agrícola e Innovación Tecnológica en las Haciendas Mexicanas: 1880-1914 (1995), Notarios y agricultores. Crecimiento y atraso en el campo mexicano, 1780-1920 (2008), Penser avec des chiffres. Banque et investissements français au Mexique, 1880-1929 (2018).

His research has been recognized and funded by various institutions, notably by the Guggenheim foundation. He is currently working on the project “Water, Forest, and Landscape: For an Environmental History of Mexico (1780-1980),” an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort examining the economic growth and stagnation of the Mexican countryside for two centuries

The project

Title: Coping with variety: Resource-use and specialization in rural change

"The present project aims to explore what the ecology of multicropping reveal about the social, economic and political dynamics of agriculture. It will adopt a broad definition of multicropping as the practice of combining more than one crop in the same land over a given period. On the one side, the term will refer to intercropping and agroforestry (spatial differentiation) where different crops are grown simultaneously in the same field (e.g. outins, ouillères and cultures intercalaires in France, coltura promiscua and piantata in Italy, milpa in Central America). On the other side, it will include sequential and relay cropping (temporal differentiation) that means a sequence of crops occupying the same piece of land within one single growing season and with potential overlapping phases.

The project will encourage scientific cooperation and networks among teams from different countries where data and historical materials allow to observe a great plurality of rural landscapes and farming systems in their long-term evolutions and through different climate conditions. If the local teams are leader in the study of these domains in specific contexts, promoting their exchanges and comparative approaches will in fact allow to better understand the functioning of the multicrop systems in changing environments."

Hosting institution: Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Énergies de Demain – Université paris Cité

Selective Bibliography

• Tortolero Alejandro, Penser avec des chiffres. Banque et investissements français au Mexique, 1880-1929. Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018, 292 pp. 
• Álvarez, Salvador y Tortolero, Alejandro, (eds).Continentes, intercambios e hibridaciones. Transferencias técnicas y culturales en la historia rural entre Europa y América (siglos XVI al XX) Colombia, CEMCA- El Colegio de Michoacán- Editorial Unimagdalena, 2023, 444 pp. 
• "Mexican agriculture in view of the crisis of the first globalization – Between the revolutionary crisis and the Great Depression (1914–1929)".  En Béaur, Gérard y Chiapparino, Francesco (Coords.), Agriculture and the Great Depression. The Rural Crisis of the 1930s in Europe and the Americas, Londres,Routledge, 2023,pp. 206-223.
• « The mexican path toward agricultural capitalism » in Études Rurales, núm. 205,2020, pp. 89-115.