In 1921 the California oil magnate Edward L. Doheny delivered a speech before his colleagues at the American Petroleum Institute. In addition to reporting that his Mexican Petroleum Company made over 100 million dollars in profits, he recalled his first visit to northern Veracruz in 1900.As the train descended from the mountains of the Sierra Madre Oriental, even an unsentimental businessman like him could not help but be moved by the landscape. Before his eyes lay

The “jungle” Doheny remembered was the northernmost end of the Mexican tropics, an area known as the Huasteca. Besides hiding the forest and, indeed, because of the forest itself, the place “hid” a complex natural history and a turbulent political past the oilman could hardly imagine. As soon as Mexico had won its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, different actors – indigenous peoples, Mexican elites, foreigners, and nature itself – had become entangled in fierce struggles over the ecology of the area. Although the forest still stood outside Doheny's private railroad car in 1900, the conflict over its future was far from resolved. Unknowingly, Doheny was also entering into a history of ecological war.

The Huasteca

The state of Veracruz rests like a half moon on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Scholars divide the state into three geographical slices: north, center, and south.