Your student should also have access to a copy of 
Brantly, JE
1971 A History of Oil Well Drilling. Gulf Publishing Co., Houston, Texas. 

It's nearly 1,600 pages long; there are only three mentions of specifically Mexican oil fields, but they are placed in the larger context of the development of oil-well drilltechnology world-wide during different periods. (... and I just found a fourth discussion that is not listed in the index, on pp 1446 ff.) If your student will be writing about the oil fields in English, he would probably find this book helpful, as Brantly has many diagrams of equipment and processes, and even lists of supplies needed to build some kinds of equipment.

For example, this is the beginning of the section on Pressure Drilling, 1920-30 (p. 1446 ff)
"The earliest pressure drilling of which the writer has some knowledge was in the oil fields of the Tampico Basin of Mexico, during the period 1920 to 1928. These operations were carried on entirely for completing relatively high pressure oil wells under control.... It was very desirable in the Panuco Field to avoid using two rigs and the hazards and disadvantages of completing the wells of heavy, ... black, asphaltic oil, flowing over the derrick and covering the derrick floor, the location and sometimes much of the surrounding country."

Therefore, if your student is working in the Panuco field, there is the possibility that huge flows of oil across the landscape around a well might predate this new system of well-drilling.

Also, yes, Scott Baxter's thesis was out of U Nevada, Reno.
His contact info is on the Society for Industrial Archeology web site: http://www.siahq.org/contacts/siacontacts/siaboard.html

Gwyn Alcock
Riverside, CA