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This article examines the historical dynamics by which Mexico's groundwater resources were knowingly depleted and contaminated from the 1930s to the 1960s. Using the paradigmatic arid north central "Laguna" region as case study, it documents how Mexican engineers alternately warned of the dangers of aquifer depletion and profited from the business opportunities "Mexicanization" of groundwater pumping technology provided via Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI)--a conflict-of-interest which symbolized the tension between advancing techno-scientific knowledge of natural processes and capitalist state formation in postrevolutionary Mexico. The central argument is that this irresolvable contradiction rendered the expert informed and officially acknowledged need for groundwater conservation well nigh impossible vis-à-vis state, private and popular demand for the resource, whether fueled by Lázaro Cárdenas' radical agrarian reform in the 1930s-- for which the Laguna served as emblem--or commercial agriculture thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]