Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water

5. Water History, Water Activism

Globalization in the Holocene D rifting continental plates collided, causing a linear eruption of underwater island-making volcanoes. Sediment from the land sifted into the aquatic spaces between the islands, joining them and forming a land bridge, the Isthmus of Panama, between North and South America that divided the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans and their currents. The earth’s Holocene epoch began during the sedimentation process, about 11,800 years ago; glaciers melted, and large wooly mammals became extinct (Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia 2006). About the same time, the Paraná River began migrating toward its alluvial plain and over the next seven thousand years swelled to such proportions that it pushed out the marine waters of an ancient gulf, creating the Río de la Plata, the Plate River. This geohydrological transformation has been deciphered in beach deposits , marine sediments, and tidal channels on La Plata’s floor (Oldani 1994). Aboriginal peoples met Europeans for the first time in the early sixteenth century, when fourteen Spanish vessels sailed into what the scribes called the Sweet Sea. The surface area of this ancient gulf now covers more than three million square kilometers. Once formed, it was shaped by four thousand years of sediments brought in by Atlantic Ocean tides and some of the world’s largest freshwater rivers (the Paraná and the Plate and also the Paraguay and Uruguay Rivers). The Paraná alone discharges more than sixteen thousand cubic meters of water per second and runs through a depression tens of kilometers 5 Water History, Water Activism Stretching out on the banks of a broad, lonely river, the city has turned its back to the water and prefers [it] to go on spilling out over the bewildered pampas , where the landscape copies itself, endlessly. —Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita 94 / Buenos Aires, Argentina wide. With very little slope and a depth of between two and six meters, it is a shallow sheet of water with a powerful hydraulic push (Oldani 1994). In the most recent few thousand years, the Holocene has seen intercontinental civilizations that inhabit industrialized conglomerations, resulting in widespread species extinction and extravagantly networked human communication systems. In geologic terms, climate change has been happening forever. Globalization (or the human effect) is a recent phenomenon , and law and crime (as concepts and modes of action) are mere drops in La Plata’s flowing waters. Today, Buenos Aires sits on a vast plain with its back to the Plate River Basin. The flowing expanses of the Plate and Paraná have inspired the powerful myth that their waters will carry away and dissolve all detritus that enters them. This myth perpetuates behavior by institutions and the general populace that flies in the face of undeniable evidence that there is a limit to the amount of feces, plastic-laden garbage, and chemical and radioactive poisons that aquatic ecologies can absorb. The myth obscures a troubling reality: Rivers flow out to sea, but tides and winds flow rhythmically back. Sediment carried down in highland torrents clog navigation channels in the basin. Even with constant dredging, the main channel is so narrow that it can handle only three vessels at a time. “Processes do not occur in space but define their own spatial frame,” writes David Harvey (2006: 123). By extension, hydrogeological processes define their own spatial frames. This intuition leads me to think about the interweaving currents, both aquatic and discursive, that carry a city’s environmental past into the human-water places of the present and how different temporal modalities define experience of water spaces. Multiple, co-occurring, but asynchronous processes transpire in radically different tempos and scales pertaining to geologic, biological, and sociopolitical phenomena and realms. The different temporal modalities, or timescapes, shape environmental crises (Adam 1998). As sump, flood, blood, fish habitat , political territory, or floating signifier, water and water talk intimately and expansively register the different modalities of a city’s existence. Through the chronological segments in this chapter, I approach water as a motivating force in urban history and, following Gandy (2003: 22), read the history of Buenos Aires as a history of water. Skullduggery of the Most Necessary Kind Initial networking for field contacts is slow going the first couple of weeks in Buenos Aires, so I fill in the time prowling through bookstores and reading history in the National Library. I learn much about riverine territory, from conquest and colonization (the first crime wave) to independence, from historian Félix Luna’s...