Gabriela Soto Laveaga Reframes the Green Revolution and Joins the Mexican Academy of History

Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University, and Co-Chair of the Mexico Studies Program at DRCLAS was formally received as a corresponding member in the United States of the Mexican Academy of History, in a ceremony led by historian Javier Garciadiego Dantán, Director of the Mexican Academy of History and Professor-Researcher at El Colegio de México.

In her induction lecture, "Memorias de revoluciones verdes: Ciencia y agrotecnología en el México rural del siglo veinte", Soto Laveaga offered a powerful reinterpretation of this pivotal agricultural transformation, placing Mexico at the center of a global story of science, agriculture, and food security.

Rather than repeating the familiar narrative that presents the Green Revolution mainly as a story of U.S. innovation and development aid, Soto Laveaga argued that Mexico’s scientific institutions, agricultural infrastructure, researchers, technicians, and farmers played a foundational role in the creation and global circulation of high-yield wheat seeds.

Her lecture focused especially on the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, where experimental agricultural work helped produce wheat varieties that would later be exported and adapted internationally. Drawing from new archives, oral histories, diplomatic reports, and visual materials, Soto Laveaga showed that the scientific and agricultural transformations associated with the Green Revolution were deeply rooted in Mexican land, labor, and expertise. 

One of the central arguments of her talk was that the dominant history of the Green Revolution has often erased or minimized Mexico’s role. Soto Laveaga challenged that version by showing how wheat seeds developed and tested in Mexico became crucial during the 1966 food crisis in India and Pakistan, when Sonoran wheat was exported abroad and helped support emergency food production.

Her research also highlighted the role of Mexican scientists, agronomists, and institutions that shaped this process before and beyond the better-known interventions of the Rockefeller Foundation and Norman Borlaug. By moving the story’s origins away from Cold War development narratives and back into the longer history of agricultural science in Mexico, she argued for a broader and more accurate understanding of how scientific knowledge is produced.

At the same time, Soto Laveaga emphasized that this history is not only one of scientific achievement. Her lecture also addressed the environmental, social, and political consequences of the Green Revolution, including monoculture, heavy dependence on agrochemicals, the displacement of other agricultural practices, and the long-term effects of development models built on unequal access to land and resources.

She also called attention to the many people and forms of knowledge that were left out of official narratives, including Mexican technicians, rural communities, local agricultural networks, and Indigenous histories tied to the land where this transformation took place. In doing so, her lecture reflected a broader commitment that has shaped her scholarship: recovering the hidden histories behind scientific discovery.

The response to her lecture was delivered by historian Claudia Agostoni, who highlighted Soto Laveaga’s major contributions to the history of science, medicine, and Mexico. Agostoni emphasized that her work has helped rethink traditional narratives by making visible the actors, institutions, and local knowledge systems that have often been excluded from conventional histories.

Her scholarship has established her as one of the leading historians of science and medicine in Mexico and Latin America. With this appointment, the Mexican Academy of History recognizes not only her distinguished academic career, but also the significance of her work in reshaping how Mexico’s scientific and historical contributions are understood on a global scale.