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Ethnohistory 48.4 (2001) 741-743



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Book Review

To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins:
The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla


To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla. By Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. xiv + 199 pp., maps, illustrations, bibliographical references, index. $49.95 cloth.)

Water, in the proper amount, is a precious commodity. Without enough, agriculture can be impossible. Too much, and crops as well as homes may be washed away. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera’s work is especially welcome because it focuses on the semi-arid, central and southern highlands of Puebla, Mexico, and joins a growing body of work on ecological changes during the colonial period.

In Puebla, rain falls between May and October but is infrequent throughout the rest of the year. Thus irrigated agriculture has a long history; hydraulic works antedated the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The region was densely inhabited by indigenous peoples who produced crops of maize and cotton. Lipsett-Rivera examines the evidence for hydraulic works and irrigated agriculture in the Puebla region and Mexico more generally before the Spanish arrived as well as the varied cultural influences (Roman, Islamic, and Visigothic) on Spanish water law. Although “the King of Spain asserted sovereignty over all territories, including rights to the soil and subsoil, the ‘waters, hilltops, and pastures’” (23), the Spanish government also operated on the basis of a doctrine of prior appropriation. This, in theory, confirmed the rights of Indian villages (in the words of a 1642 decree) to “the waters and irrigation; and the lands in which they had [End Page 741] made irrigation canals” (23) and to continue their existing divisions and allocations of water.

Imported epidemic diseases caused a dramatic population decline, which left land and water available for arriving conquistadors and missionaries, who introduced herds of grazing livestock and planted wheat and sugar cane. Once Spaniards had gained access to a bit of land and water, their advantages in the colonial system began to work in their favor: they were more likely to grow cash crops and to have access to the governing authorities, who regarded the Spanish as more credible witnesses. These advantages began to counteract the longer tradition of water use by Indian communities.

Apparently there were few problems with the distribution of water in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but by the eighteenth century, population growth and the commercial opportunities for marketing wheat and sugar had put increasing pressure on water resources. In the eighteenth century, conflicts over water and its distribution increased, as the balance between land and water was disrupted by the growth of population, environmental degradation (caused by Spanish agricultural practices of plowing, irrigating fields on a gradient, and introducing herds of cows and sheep), and the destruction of terraces as well as the increased demand for water that the largely Spanish-grown commercial crops like wheat and sugar required.

Distant authorities were generally slow to act, and the pressing, seasonal demands of agriculture were inexorable; as a result, whoever could effectively control water was able to survive. Hence, the desperation and defiance expressed in the book’s title, which is taken from a protest registered by the village of Coxcatlán in 1790. Not all of the conflicts pitted Spanish estate owners against Indian villages; Lipsett-Rivera recounts conflicts between villages as well as by one Spaniard against another. At the end of the colonial period, Spanish estate owners tended to monopolize irrigation rights, despite the willingness of villagers to resort to violence whenever their continued existence was on the line. They unilaterally broke irrigation works, destroyed dams, and diverted water when they needed it (techniques Lipsett-Rivera terms “active resistance”). When the seasonal demand was not urgent, they also appealed to the courts (which Lipsett-Rivera calls “passive resistance”), knowing that, although the colonial bureaucracy was slow, it was necessary in order to keep up efforts on this front...

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