Village-Scale Practices and Water Sources in Indigenous Mexico after the Neoliberalizing of Social Property

Abstract

To establish whether social property villages ("núcleos agrarios") in indigenous, well-watered parts of Mexico are maintaining the same degree of village-scale control of water sources that they practiced before the neoliberal land tenure reforms of the 1990s, three sources of data were investigated in two regions: the Huasteca of San Luis Potosí state (home to indigenous Teenek, Nahua, and Pame residents, as well as non-indigenous people), and the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca state (home to indigenous Zapotec and Chinantec residents, and a smaller number of non-indigenous people). The three data sources were: 1. Archival documents at state offices of the National Agrarian Registry (Registro Agrario Nacional, or RAN); 2. Participatory research mapping (PRM) data acquired in fifteen villages, with the author as sole academic researcher in one of these (the Zapotec núcleo of Talea de Castro); 3. GIS (geodata) analysis of water sources (springs) and land tenure zones in both regions, encompassing about 460 social property núcleos as well as private and public lands. Neither spatially-defined ownership of land where water resources are located, nor conceptual rights and obligations (enacted through local practices), were found to have undergone extraordinary changes in the two decades since the neoliberal reforms were initiated. However, these reforms were found to have played a key role in the gradual shift in legal and practical emphasis away from a fusion of village and individual attachments to water sources (regardless of legal or locally-defined land tenure), and toward a simplified, spatially unambiguous distinction between village and individual land units, linked to a nationwide program of water rights concessions which favor the individual and the state over the village. This shift in emphasis is being successfully resisted in many villages, particularly in indigenous ones. This resistance often takes the form of creative engagement with state initiatives such as the 1993-2006 land surveying and certification program PROCEDE and its successor FANAR. Nevertheless, village orientation toward water partly depends on de facto, orally transmitted local practices which will vanish in some villages during the next several decades.