To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla
Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Reviewed by Stephen M. Perkins, assistant professor of anthropology, Oklahoma State University.

    Situated on the eastern slopes of Highland Central Mexicoâs volcanic divide, the Valley of Puebla has always been overshadowed by its western neighbor, the Valley of Mexico.  In economic and political terms, the Valley of Mexicoâs Aztec Empire dominated Puebla before the Spanish conquest; afterward Mexico City reigned as the viceregal and national capital.  Today scholars oftentimes perpetuate this bias.  We assume that whatever historical conditions or trends occurred in the Valley of Mexico must have held true in the east.  But as more attention is paid to Puebla, we learn that such generalizations are valid in certain cases, but certainly not in others.  Sonya Lipsett-Rivera augments our understanding of Pueblaâs colonial agrarian society by investigating its history of water management and conflict, focusing especially on the semi-arid Valley of Puebla between 1680 and 1821.

    Lipsett-Rivera begins by correctly arguing that the environment is rarely treated as a dynamic variable.  Instead, it is painted as a frozen backdrop against which other variables play out (p. ix).  As with much of Highland Central Mexico, Pueblaâs semi-arid environment, with pronounced wet and dry seasons, structured indigenous cultivation long before recorded time.  Cultivators irrigated prior to the rainy season to increase crop yields.  Lipsett-Rivera seeks to understand how indigenous peoples managed water rights, and how agricultural production under Spanish colonialism impacted the environment, modified water consumption and culminated in a surge of water conflicts between Spaniards and Indians in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

    Although her study centers on later colonial years, she notes the difficulty of determining how indigenous peoples regulated irrigation before the Spanish, and posits that indigenous nobles likely governed and maintained it (pp. 12-16).  She is probably correct, but her conclusion nevertheless raises the larger issue of how city-states were organized and how each one managed irrigation.  Much of the best ethnohistorical work in Puebla focuses on corporate units unique (at least in name) to this valley.  Known as teccalli, or noble houses, these stratified organizations were composed of noble tribute collectors and their commoner tributaries.  It appears that multiple noble houses structured every Puebla city-state.  In terms of land tenure, the lands of each noble house were scattered about in small parcels, usually interspersed among those of other noble houses.  This pattern raises the question of how irrigation could be managed in such a fragmented socio-political terrain.  Perhaps this role fell to a city-stateâs rulers.  Such control may have given them tangible authority over the smaller, but quite autonomous noble houses.  But we can only speculate.
 
    With the colonial period, Lipsett-Rivera investigates how Spaniards gained access to water rights, given their own legal system predicated on prior appropriation:  ãThe doctrine of prior appropriation gave the Indians an inherent right to irrigation because it favored the rights of the people who had used water for the longest period of timeä (p. 23).  As with the usurpation of indigenous land, local Spaniards resorted to a variety of legal and illegal methods to acquire rights to water and circumvent the doctrine of prior appropriation.  During the 16th and 17th centuries, Pueblaâs indigenous population declined precipitously due to European-borne diseases: as indigenous peoplesâ water requirements shrank, Spaniards moved to have waters ãdenouncedä as unused and therefore eligible for reassignment by colonial officials.  Spaniards also collected water rights in payment for Indian debt or illegally usurped water.  They might initially rent water rights from Indians.  Such ãarrangements were dangerous because they allowed a usufruct which could be transformed into rights of servidumbre (a kind of squatterâs right)ä (p. 31).  Once established, no matter how murky the original acquisition had been, colonial government titles, such as mercedes (grants) or composiciones (compositions), could be purchased to create an official paper trail that legitimated Spanish water rights.

    With the vast expansion of Spanish agriculture, Puebla became the single most important breadbasket of early colonial Mexico.  Not only did it supply the domestic market with products such as wheat, sugar, corn, livestock, and other products, but it also exported its major crop, wheat, to Spanish communities in the Caribbean and South America (pp. 62-63).  Indians cultivated certain of these crops, especially corn and to a lesser extent wheat, but the greatest production occurred on large Spanish estates (or haciendas) that had been developing since the 16th century (Chapters 4 and 5).

    Intensified agricultural production came at the expense of the environment.  Spanish plow agriculture and heavy exploitation of natural resources (e.g., deforestation and cattle grazing), led to increased erosion and lowered water tables.  Moreover, by the late 17th century Pueblaâs Indian population began to recover.  Population growth demanded greater agricultural production by Indians, though little surplus land or water remained.

    With environmental degradation and population growth, the easy acquisition of water rights by Spaniards gave way to a rising tide of conflict in Pueblaâs 18th and 19th-century countryside.  Puebla lacked a special bureaucracy to adjudicate water disputes.  Instead, Indians and Spaniards took matters into their own hands or appealed to colonial courts.  Lipsett-Rivera (pp. 113-124) details both strategies, noting that when Indians or Spaniards desperately needed water they resorted to ãactive resistance,ä sabotaging waterworks (dams, ditches, aqueducts) to redirect water to their own fields, or directly confronting adversaries.  Active resistance became especially common during the dry season when irrigation was crucial.  Long-term attempts to gain state support for water restoration resulted in acts of ãpassive resistanceä---court cases that might drag on for years without resolution.

    As outlined in Chapter 7, cities and pueblos also felt the pinch.  Late colonial communities litigated to acquire access to water for drinking, urban livestock, gardens and other necessities.  As upstream agriculturalists or villages diverted water, downstream communities suffered.  Resolution of shortages could be difficult since accused offenders often lived outside a local municipal jurisdiction, so that despite ãknowing quite clearly who was responsible for their water shortages, village officials frequently could not prevent nor even stop such abusesä (p. 132).  Residents of major population centers, such as Cholula, Tepeaca, San Andrés Chalchicomula, and others throughout central Puebla, experienced severe water scarcity.  ãSeveral villages complained that they were losing young folk and linked the pattern of migration to water shortages.  The loss of population in eighteenth-century Poblano villages was part of a larger trend described by other scholarsä (p. 137).
 
    One major reason for rural and urban turmoil is that Puebla lacked a centralized bureaucracy to regulate water consumption.  Citing other studies of water management, Lipsett-Rivera constructs a dichotomy between decentralized and centralized systems.  Historically, decentralized systems existed where agriculturalists lacked a bureaucracy that specialized in water management and allocation, as opposed to a centralized system where such a bureaucracy operated (pp. 3, 40).  She hypothesizes that when the ãequilibrium between population, land, and water was disturbed, the result was an increase in the level of hostilities over irrigation which in turn stimulated the centralization processä (p. 41).  In Puebla, environmental degradation and population growth hastened this process, leading to initial attempts at centralization.  Even so, as she documents, control of water by Indian communities or haciendas during late colonial years depended far more on intimidation and force than on bureaucratic rationality.  Actual centralization did not occur until the Mexican Revolution, a full century later (p. 152).

    Finally, an issue on which Lipsett-Rivera wavers is Pueblaâs late colonial economic crisis.  A number of scholars propose that as regions like the Bajío, located north of the Valley of Mexico, increasingly supplied wheat to the colonyâs expanding northern mining economy, Puebla experienced a severe and prolonged economic downturn.  In an earlier important article (1990 Hispanic American Historical Review 70:463-481), Lipsett-Rivera argues that Pueblaâs chronic water shortages inhibited agricultural production, exacerbating economic instability.  In her book, she reiterates this problem at one juncture (p. 63), but elsewhere cites commercial expansion as another factor impacting water shortages (pp. 47, 79, 106).  How strong was Pueblaâs economy during the late colonial era?  What effect did it have on the struggle for water?  Addressing these questions more directly would have further contextualized Pueblaâs acrimonious water politics and added an important political-economic angle to her study.

    Aside from the discrepancies raised here---likely of more interest to specialists than to general readers---Lipsett-Riveraâs book offers a good deal of valuable and interesting information on Central Mexican colonial history organized in a clear and accessible format.  As mentioned at the outset, she illuminates historical processes in a region too often overshadowed by the adjacent Valley of Mexico.  Moreover, she addresses a topic often curiously neglected, given its supreme importance for human survival.  The study of colonial water rights outlines in microcosm the historical and ecological processes occurring on a much larger scale in the modern world.