The Aftermath of Revolution: The Transformation of Irrigation Systems in The Mexican Bajío
In scholarly circles it is generally recognized that during the pre-Hispanic Post-Classic period the region known as the Mexican Bajío was a frontier zone between numerous Chichimec tribes and the state-organized Nahuatl and Tarascan societies. This means that there is little archaeological evidence from that epoch, in contrast to earlier periods, as contemporary archaeologists have amply demonstrated. However, with the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century and their expansion into northern New Spain, Spanish and indigenous colonization made the Bajío one of the most prosperous regions in the Spanish Empire. Indeed, the development of an economy based on mining, commerce, manufacturing and agriculture meant that it became, in the conceptualization of the North American historian John Tutino, a key region for the history of world capitalism.
For the purposes of this paper we can draw a line of continuous growth in the agricultural frontier of the Bajío from the 16th century to the first half of the 20th, the foundations of which were twin pillars: first, the ongoing construction of irrigation systems fed by the tributary currents of the Lerma River; and, second, the different sources of water identified there (perennial, torrential and underground). But while it is certain that the construction of hydraulic infrastructure for irrigation can be documented from the 16th century, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries that landscapes in the Bajío underwent a radical transformation as new lands were incorporated into agricultural production and earlier crops were displaced as Mexico dramatically increased wheat production. As I believe I have demonstrated in previous studies, one factor that led to making this process a reality was the control and exploitation of torrential waters through the practice of building embankments around agricultural fields to trap water (entarquinamiento). The perfection of this technique, which required enormous volumes of water, broad territorial extensions, large investments of capital and a huge workforce, allowed the Bajío to construct irrigation systems that, while small in scale compared to modern parameters, were socially and technologically complex, and together covered thousands of acres and contributed to transforming the Bajío into the breadbasket of New Spain and 19th-century Mexico.
Those systems were created and administered through the oligarchic logic of the hacienda, independent of the control of political authority at any level; that is, they were built in accordance with the interests, and under the control, of the resources –economic and natural– that contemporary hacendados possessed, and administered by associations of private irrigators. Thus we may ask: What repercussions did the social policies of the 1910 Mexican Revolution have on water management in the Bajío?; What were the consequences of establishing irrigation districts on top of those ancient hydraulic systems?; What changes in the landscape occurred as a result of applying the great irrigation works of the Revolution?; and, What repercussions did hydraulic policies have on the social organization of irrigation? These are some of the question we attempt to elucidate in this paper.