The University of Arizona

From water abundance to water scarcity: the case of the Chontalpa, Mexico

Gisela Lanzas

Abstract


This article uses original ethnographic data to show how a development program known as Plan Chontalpa failed to extend potable water provision to rural people in Chontalpa, in Tabasco, Mexico. Despite arguably short-term benefits, this large state-led, large-scale hydrodevelopment program created overly large infrastructures and imposed a hierarchical water management regime on previously open-access water resources, negatively impacting the communities it purported to serve. This article demonstrates how, in lieu of the vulnerabilities created by the Plan, residents have resiliently devised their own water management system that combines customary techniques, such as harvesting rainwater, with formal and informal ones. In conclusion, this article insists that water management resilient practices at the household level can teach us alternative ways of decision-making that can transform local development efforts.

Keywords: resilience, political ecology, water harvesting technique, household management, hydrodevelopment


Full Text:

PDF

References


Adler, D. 2015. The war for Mexico's water. Foreign Policy. July 31st.

Arrieta, P. 1994. Integración social de la Chontalpa: un análisis regional en el trópico Mexicano. México City: Centro de Investigación para la Integración Social.

Banister, J.M. 2010. Deluges of grandeur: water, territory, and power on Northwestern Mexico's Río Mayo, 1880-1910. Water Alternatives 4(1): 25-43.

Barkin, D. and T. King. 1970. Regional economic development, the river basin approach in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barkin, D. 1978. Desarrollo regional y reorganización campesina: la Chontalpa como reflejo del problema agropecuario Mexicano. México, DF - Centro de Ecodesarrollo: Nueva Imagen.

Barkin, D. (ed.). 2006. La gestión del agua urbana en México: retos, debates y bienestar. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco: Sociales y Humanidades.

Barrios, R. 2016. Resilience: a commentary from the vantage point of anthropology. Annals of Anthropological Practice 40(1): 28-38.

Bollig, M. 2014. Resilience—analytical tool, bridging concept or development goal? Anthropological perspectives on the use of a border object. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 139(2): 253-279.

Brown, C., J.L. Castro Ruiz, N. Lowery and R. Wright. 2003. Comparative analysis of transborder water management strategies: case studies on the U.S.-Mexican border. In Michel, S. (ed.). The U.S.-Mexican border environment: binational water planning. San Diego: San Diego State University Press. Pp. 279-286.

Carey, M. 2009. Latin American environmental history: current trends, interdisciplinary insights, and future directions. Environmental History 14(2): 221-252.

Castano, I. 2012. Mexico's water war. Forbes. Feb. 22nd.

Chakrabarty, D. 1985. Invitation to a dialogue. Subaltern Studies 4: 364-376.

Coe, M. and R. Koontz. 2013. Mexico, from the Olmec to the Aztecs. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Colburn, F. (ed.). 1989. Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

Dávila-Poblete, S., A.H. Treviño and S. Gutiérrez. 2006. El poder del agua: participación social o empresarial: México, la experiencia piloto del neoliberalismo para América Latina. México: ITACA.

Dewey, K. 1981. Nutritional consequences of the transformation from subsistence to commercial agriculture in Tabasco, Mexico. Human Ecology 9: 151-187.

Donahue, J.M. and B.R. Johnston (eds.). 1998. Introduction. In Johnston B.R. and J. Donahue (eds.). Water, culture and power: local struggles in a global context. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Escobar, A. 2011. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Esteva, G. 1987. Regenerating people's space. Alternatives 12(1): 125-152.

Farmer, P. 2006. Aids and accusation: Haiti and the geography of blame. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fernandes, W. 2007. Singur and the displacement scenario. Economic and Political Weekly 42(3): 203–206.

Ferguson, J. 1990. The anti-politics machine: development, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gama, L., M.A. Ortiz-Pérez, E. Moguel-Ordóñez, R. Collado-Torres, H. Díaz-López, C. Villanueva-García and M.E. Macías-Valadez. 2011. Flood risk assessment in Tabasco, Mexico. Water Resource Management 6: 631-639.

Glantz, S. 1979. Manuel: una biografía política. México City: Editorial Nueva Imagen.

Hsu, M., R. Howitt and F. Miller. 2015. Procedural vulnerability and institutional capacity deficits in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction: insights from Wutai Rukai experiences of Typhoon Morakot. Human Organization 74(4): 308–318.

INEGI 2010. Anuario estadístico y geográfico de Tabasco. México: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI).

Jhabvala, F. 2006. Gestión del agua en Tabasco. In Barkin, D. (ed.). La gestión del agua urbana en México: retos, debates y bienestar. México: Universidad de Guadalajara.

Johnston, B.R. 2003. The political ecology of water: an introduction. Capitalism Nature Socialism 14(3): 73-90.

Johnston, B.R. 2005. The commodification of water and the human dimensions of manufactured scarcity. In Whiteford, L. and S. Whiteford (eds.). Globalization, water and health: resource management in time of scarcity. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Pp. 133-152.

Johnston, B.R. 2012. Introduction: hydrodevelopment, cultural diversity, and sustainability. In Johnston, B.R., L. Hiwasaki, I.J. Klaver, A. Ramos Castillo and V. Strang (eds.). Water, cultural diversity, and global environmental change: emerging trends, sustainable futures? New York, London: Springer. Pp. 291-293.

Johnston, B.R. 2013. Human needs and environmental rights to water: a biocultural systems approach to hydrodevelopment and management. Ecosphere 4(3): 39

Lansing, S. 1987. Balinese water temples and the management of irrigation. American Anthropologist 89(2): 326-341.

Lanzas, G. 2011. Contested realities: the intersection between water management for hydroelectricity and food production in Tabasco, Mexico. Practicing Anthropology 33(4): 24-28.

Lanzas, G. 2014. Plan Chontalpa: continual impacts of a regional water management development program on the livelihoods strategies of small-scale producers in Chontalpa, Tabasco, Mexico. Ph.D. Dissertation. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lanzas, G. and M. Whittle. 2017. Empowering or impoverishing through credit: small-scale producers and the Plan Chontalpa in Tabasco, Mexico. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 78: 90-101.

Linton, J. and J. Budds. 2014. The hydrological cycle: defining and mobilizing a relational-dialectical approach to water. Geoforum 57: 170-180.

Liverman, D., R. Varady, O. Chávez and R. Sánchez. 1999. Environmental issues along the U.S.-Mexico Border: drivers of changes and the response of citizens and institutions. Annual Review of Energy and Environment 24: 607-643.

MacKinnon, D. and K.D. Derickson. 2013. From resilience to resourcefulness: a critique of resilience policy and activism. Progress in Human Geography 37(2): 253-270.

Martínez, C. 2006. Breve historia de Tabasco. México: El Colegio de México, Fideicomiso Historia de Las Américas, y Fondo de Cultura Económica.

McCully, P. 2001. Silenced rivers: the ecology and politics of large dams. New York: Zed Books.

McMichael, P. 2004. Development and social change: a global perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Melville, R. 1990. TVA y el desarrollo de las cuencas fluviales: el caso del Valle Elk, analizado por antropólogos Méxicanos. Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana.

Mintz, S. W. 1974. Worker in the cane: a Puerto Rican life history. New York: W.W. Norton.

Moore, D., J. Dore and D. Gyawali. 2010. The World Commission on Dams + 10: revisiting the large dam controversy. Water Alternatives 3(2): 3-13.

Oliver-Smith, A. 1999. What is a disaster? Anthropological perspectives on a persistent question. In Oliver-Smith, A. and S. Hoffman (eds.). The angry Earth: disaster in anthropological perspective. New York: Routledge. Pp. 18-34.

Olsson, T.C. 2017. Agrarian crossings: reformers and the remaking of the US and Mexican countryside. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Peña, D.G. 2003. The watershed commonwealth of the Upper Rio Grande. In Boyce, J.K. and B.G. Shelley (eds.). Natural assets: democratizing environmental ownership. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Pp. 169-185.

Richter, B.D., S. Postel, C. Revenga, T. Scudder, B. Lehner, A. Churchill and M. Chow. 2010. Lost in development's shadow: the downstream human consequences of dams. Water Alternatives 3(2):14–42.

Robinson, N. 2007. Revolutionizing the river: the politics of water management in southeastern Mexico, 1951-1974. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History. New Orleans: Tulane University.

Rodríguez, S. 2006. Acequia: water sharing, sanctity, and place. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Rubio-Gutiérrez, H. and C. Triana-Ramírez. 2006. Gestión integrada de crecientes. caso de estudio: México: Río Grijalva. México: Unidad de Apoyo Técnico.

Sachs, W. 1999. Planet dialectics: explorations in environment and development. London: Zed Books.

Sanabria, H. 2007. The anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean. USA: Pearson Education.

Schuller, M. 2016. Humanitarian aftershocks in Haiti. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Scudder, T. 2005. The future of large dams: dealing with social, environmental, institutional and political costs. London: Earthscan.

Scott, J.C. 1999. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Scott, J.C. and B. Kerkvliet. 1986. Everyday forms of peasant resistance in South-East Asia. Journal of Peasant Studies 13(2): 5-35.

Scott, C. and J. M. Banister. 2008. The dilemma of water management 'regionalization' in Mexico under centralized resource allocation. Water Resources Development 24(1):61-74.

Spivak, G. 1995. Subaltern talk. In Landry, D. and G. MacLean (eds.). The Spivak reader. London: Routledge.

Strang, V. 2004. The meaning of water. Oxford: Berg.

Swyngedouw, E., M. Kaika and E. Castro. 2002. Urban water: a political-ecology perspective. Built Environment 28(2): 124-137.

Toby, S. 2004. Ancient Mexico and Central America: archaeology and culture history. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Thompson, E.P. 1978. The poverty of theory and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Toledo, A. 1983. Cómo destruir el paraíso. México City: Centro de Ecodesarrollo-CECODES/Océano.

Tudela, F. 1989. La modernización forzada del trópico: el caso de Tabasco, Proyecto Integrado del Golfo. México: El Colegio de Michoacán.

Watson, L. and M.-B. Watson-Franke. 1985. Interpreting life histories: an anthropological inquiry. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

World Commission on Dams (WCD). 2000. Dams and development: a new framework for decision making. The report of the World Commission on Dams. London: Earthscan.

Worster, D. 1985. Rivers of empire: water, aridity, and the growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon Books.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.2458/v27i1.23214