Article
Spanish
ID: <
oai:doaj.org/article:0b3f2424030b4e47b81735c8601db0ee>
Abstract
The current irrigation district 038 or the Mayo valley, which is part of the irrigation area in north-west Mexico, emerges from historical struggles to build an official order in a diverse world of signs, symbols, processes, places and people. It is the ancestral home of ioremes (mayes), an indigenous group for which colonisation and agricultural development have meant the loss of autonomy and seasonal mobility they need to survive in arid terrain. It is the place where President Álvaro Obregón, the other chickpeas producer, was born and transformed the late 19th century irrigation practices into 20th century water management laws and institutions. Reconfiguring the territory in order to centralise (‘federalise’) water resources has proven to be excessively difficult in the Mayo area, but this was particularly the case at the beginning of the federalisation process, an era of dynamic modernisation under President Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910). Research into Mexico’s hydroelectric policy, with some important exceptions, has tended to focus on centralisation. Academics have paid less attention to times and places where water is outside the control of the authorities. This work explores the importance of water administration (and more broadly state formation) at the end of the nineteenth century, in the run-up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, as a continuous series of land rights and projects. Understanding the weaknesses and incompetences of such projects offers a crucial discernment about post-revolutionary or contemporary water policy.