Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta - Hardcover

Muehlmann, Shaylih

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822354438 ISBN 13: 9780822354437

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Living in the northwest of Mexico, the Cucapá people have relied on fishing as a means of subsistence for generations, but in the last several decades, that practice has been curtailed by water scarcity and government restrictions. The Colorado River once met the Gulf of California near the village where Shaylih Muehlmann conducted ethnographic research, but now, as a result of a treaty, 90 percent of the water from the Colorado is diverted before it reaches Mexico. The remaining water is increasingly directed to the manufacturing industry in Tijuana and Mexicali. Since 1993, the Mexican government has denied the Cucapá people fishing rights on environmental grounds. While the Cucapá have continued to fish in the Gulf of California, federal inspectors and the Mexican military are pressuring them to stop. The government maintains that the Cucapá are not sufficiently "indigenous" to warrant preferred fishing rights. Like many indigenous people in Mexico, most Cucapá people no longer speak their indigenous language; they are highly integrated into nonindigenous social networks. Where the River Ends is a moving look at how the Cucapá people have experienced and responded to the diversion of the Colorado River and the Mexican state's attempts to regulate the environmental crisis that followed.

About this title

About the Author

Shaylih Muehlmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Language, Culture and the Environment at the University of British Columbia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Where the River Ends

CONTESTED INDIGENEITY IN THE MEXICAN COLORADO DELTA

By SHAYLIH MUEHLMANN

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5443-7

Contents

Illustrations and Maps.....................................................
ix
Acknowledgments............................................................
xi
Introduction...............................................................
1
Chapter 1. "Listen for When You Get There": Topologies of Invisibility on 
the Colorado River.........................................................
25
Chapter 2. The Fishing Conflict and the Making and Unmaking of Indigenous 
Authenticity...............................................................
55
Chapter 3. "What Else Can I Do with a Boat and No Nets?" Ideologies of 
Work and the Alternatives at Home..........................................
83
Chapter 4. Mexican Machismo and a Woman's Worth............................
118
Chapter 5. "Spread Your Ass Cheeks": And Other Things That Shouldn't Get 
Said in Indigenous Languages...............................................
146
Conclusions................................................................
171
Notes......................................................................
181
References.................................................................
189
Index......................................................................
215

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

"LISTEN FOR WHEN YOU GET THERE"

Topologies of Invisibility on the Colorado River

We are here. We eat, we dance, we fish.Here we are and we still live.No éramos, somos. (It's not that we were, we are.)

—DON MADELENO

DON MADELENO OFTEN REPEATED the refrain "We're still here." Thefirst time I heard him say this, I interpreted it as a triumphant declarationof survival. In this instance, Don Madeleno was narrating the history ofthe Cucapá people in the delta: a history of war, conquest, disease, waterscarcity, the criminalization of fishing, and the rise of the narco-economy.After everything his people had experienced, they were still there carryingon with their lives.

I heard Don Madeleno use the phrase in this sense on many otheroccasions: in interviews, at festivals, and in informal conversations. Becauseit was part of his personal narration I was struck when I first heardhim use the phrase in a much more literal sense in the context of maps.Every so often I would bring Don Madeleno a map of the delta frombooks or archives to elicit his reactions to these representations of the landhe knew so well. Every time I brought him a map we went through thesame routine: he would look over the page slowly and meticulously andstart pointing to all of the places it was missing. He would comment onwhether or not the map showed the Cucapá village, the fishing grounds,and the Sierra Cucapá. He would also bring up the places that were almostalways missing—Las Pintas, Pozo de Coyote, and a dozen other sites importantto Cucapá history. Then Don Madeleno would irritatedly declare,while pointing at the absent places, "Estamos aquí" (We are here). Onceor twice he went on to emphasize his point by saying, "Somos aquí" (Weare this place).

In this context, "We are here" took on a meaning that is central to theissues I explore in this chapter. What Don Madeleno meant was that whileyou would not know it from looking at any official map of the area, theColorado delta is a terrain rich with the traces of his people's presence:their places, stories, and history. And by saying "Nosotros somos aquí" heinvoked an even stronger connection to place, drawing on the distinctionin Spanish between the two verbs for "to be": ser and estar. Whereas estar isused to describe the current state of something and is almost always usedto describe a location in space, ser is used to describe the unchangeablenature of something. By emphasizing "somos aquí," Don Madeleno wasarguing that his people were not just occupying the delta but that theywere the delta and that their very being was inseparable from that space.

This statement is not just a strategic invocation; it is also indicative ofDon Madeleno's personal experience of the changing landscape. He wasborn on February 16, 1934, one year before the construction of the BoulderDam (later renamed the "Hoover"), the first of the large dams on the river.His life has spanned exactly the time frame in which the Colorado Riverhas been siphoned off from the lower part of the delta where his village islocated. Since the first dam went in, about eighty dams and diversionshave been built on the rivers of the Colorado watershed (Reisner 1993: 40).In the process, the flow of the Colorado to the delta and the Gulf wascompletely cut of.

In this chapter I analyze how maps, literature, and media coverage colludein a representation of the Colorado River that erases the Colorado deltaand its inhabitants in northern Mexico. Therefore, this chapter providesthe historical background and upstream context for why the river nolonger reaches the sea. I argue that the rhetoric around the construction ofthese dams, and in particular the central concept of "beneficial use,"promoted a particular water logic that carries through to present-daypolitics. Whereas in later chapters I examine how people experience thematerial efects of this water logic, in this chapter I examine how theyexperience the political and ideological erasure that results from it. Indoing so, I trace a landscape that has been made invisible in representationsof the river. This is a landscape filled with the places people navigateon a daily basis—their homes, the river, el monte (the bush), el zanjón (thefishing grounds)—as well as the places at a greater distance but still intimatelyconnected to everyday routes in and out of the village: CerroPrieto, nearby colonias, and el Valle de Guadalupe.

The narrative will also visit, if only in stories, places that no longer exist:colonias wiped out by floods; fishing grounds long evaporated as a result ofthe dams upstream; the Colorado River itself, now whisked off" in canalsalong the border. And we visit the places that feature in legends andcreation myths: where Coyote first shared water with the people, themountain of the eagle where the spirits go after death, the mountain rangethat a giant carved into the shape of houses and windows. I conclude byanalyzing a mapmaking project that attempts to redraw the map of theColorado delta and the Cucapa territory.

The Mirage on the Map: The Makings of a River without a Delta

The idea that space is made meaningful is familiar to anthropology, whichhas long recognized that the experience of space is socially constructed.Several authors have pointed out that a key concern in the politics of placemaking is the question of who has the power to make spaces and what is atstake in the process (Braun 2002; Gordillo 2004; Gupta and Fergusoni992). This is a particularly important consideration in the context ofenvironmental disputes, which construct places in specific ways. Constructionsof place that focus on nature, regardless of whether this focus isin nature's "defense," can participate in colonialist erasures of native peoplefrom political geographies (Braun 2002). These erasures are often accomplishedthrough powerful representations of place, which are used tolegitimate specific institutional policies and practices (Carbaugh 2001;McElhinny 2006; Muhlhausler and Peace 2006; Myerson and Ryden 1996).Maps, media coverage, and educational materials on the Colorado Riverare a vivid example of exactly such strategic representations.

Gupta and Ferguson (i992) have emphasized that "the presumption thatspaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to concealsuccessfully the topography of power" (8). Tsing (2000: 330) has voiced acomplementary concern by pointing out that the recent fascination withglobal flows obscures the material and institutional components throughwhich powerful and central sites are constructed. The dangers of both anassumption of autonomy and fluidity in spatial imaginaries is apparent inthe case of the Colorado delta. Here a discourse of free trade, migration,and movement has obscured the very real friction that the border creates:the river barely makes it down across the border to Mexico, and migrantsare increasingly prevented from making it up across the border to theUnited States. Ironically, this very friction is facilitated by a parallel assumptionof autonomy. The lands and people across the border in Mexicoare over and over again represented as a blankness on maps from agenciesin the United States and are rarely mentioned in many of the major literaryand historical works on the Colorado River.

Before exploring the geographies made invisible by the representationsof global flows, it's helpful to look at how those powerful sites and flowsbecame constituted in the first place. This is the central question thatguided my archival research upstream in the Bureau of Reclamation inBoulder, Nevada, and the Cline Library's archive on the Colorado Plateauin Flagstaf, Arizona. In these archives, I sifted through dozens of documentson the construction of the dams and the litigation of the ColoradoRiver: water compacts, explorers' accounts, treaties, and educational aswell as promotional pamphlets. The archival material I analyze here waspublished in the decades around the Boulder Canyon Project, which wascompleted in 1935. Most of these documents were produced in associationwith the Bureau of Reclamation, an agency under the US Department ofthe Interior. The Bureau of Reclamation oversees water resource management,specifically the oversight and operation of water diversions, and hydroelectricpower generation projects that the bureau has built throughoutthe western United States since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Because maps are the most obvious representations of land and water, Ipaid particular attention to them. The two defining features of maps ofthe Colorado River are that they show the river running through land it nolonger reaches and that they almost always represent the river as the lonedetail south of the border, running through a featureless and vacant landscape(see map 1.1). By showing the river flowing where it no longer exists,these maps deny the fact that the Colorado's water is almost entirelyappropriated for use in the United States and that the strongly diminishedflows that cross the border are appropriated by the Mexican border manufacturingor agricultural zone. The blankness represented south of theborder also implies that it does not matter if the water does not reach thereanyway, since there is ostensibly no life in the area. Note that in map 1.1, allof the major dams, reservoirs, states, and state lines in the United States arerepresented but that none are represented in Mexico. These features depoliticizethe overuse of water upstream both by obscuring the extent ofoveruse as well as providing a potential justification for this water notreaching Mexico.

The consistency of these features on maps from the Boulder Dam Commission,the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Indian Affairsillustrates the extent to which the Bureau of Reclamation has defined thegeography of the American West. Other agencies concerned with thedistribution of water follow suit in their representation of the river. Forexample, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a map oftribal lands along the border that also showed conspicuously little detailbelow the border (see map 1.2 [Environmental Protection Agency 1998]).What is even more striking is to find the river represented as reaching thesea by an agency concerned with environmental degradation. Federalenvironmental agencies have certainly no jurisdiction across internationalterritories, but as many environmentalists have pointed out, ecosystemsdo not obey borders, hence environmental problems cannot be treated innational isolation (Kiy and Wirth 1998).

The material effects of these representations are that they underwritedecades of policy that effectively cut off the delta, both literally and graphically,from the rest of the river in the process of its development upstream(Fradkin 1981). As Bergman has argued (Bergman 2002), since the HooverDam was completed on the Colorado River in 1935, the delta has been a"blind spot" in the American imagination.

Maps are a particularly obvious case of how representations of place canbe used as instruments of persuasion and power rather than impartial toolsof reference (Hanks i999b; Wood and Fels 1992). However, maps are notthe only tools that experts use to represent the river in particular ways andfor particular purposes. Engineers and ranchers in the United States drawon an expert discourse, colloquially identified as "waterspeak." Waterspeakis famous along the Colorado River for its extensive and often opaquevocabulary. For example, a common unit of measurement for the river isan "acrefoot," or 326,000 gallons (approximately enough water to sustaina family of four for a year). Another common term is "waterdebt," whichrefers to when one country or state has used more than its allotment ofwater ("waterdebt" is measured in "acrefeet").

At a tribal water summit in Flagstaf, Arizona, in August 2005 thatbrought together tribal members along the Colorado River in the UnitedStates, several people argued that waterspeak itself forms an exclusivediscourse which controls access to the river. In the summit dialogue and inmy interviews with some of the attendees, it was repeatedly expressed thatwaterspeak constitutes an exclusive language understandable only to waterengineers, lawyers, and ranchers. Indeed, waterspeak is further legitimatedby the legal framework through which the river is allotted, a frameworkknown as the "Law of the River": a massive collection of treaties,compacts, and court decisions stipulating the conditions under whichwater is distributed.

One of the most interesting and prevalent concepts found in the intricatevocabulary of waterspeak is the idea of 'beneficial use." Peter Culp, anenvironmental lawyer, argues that this is the unifying concept in the Lawof the River (2000). According to the Bureau of Reclamation, "beneficialuse" is the use of a reasonable amount of water necessary to accomplish thepurpose of appropriation without waste. The uses that are consideredbeneficial according to the Colorado Compact are "water applied to domesticand agricultural uses," where domestic use "shall include the use ofwater for household, stock, municipal mining milling industrial and otherlike purposes" (quoted in Culp 2000: 14).

It is important to clarify how "waste" is used in this context. In mostparts of the United States, "wasting water" refers to using too much wateror using water for frivolous purposes (e.g., long showers, golf courses). Onthe Colorado River, however, "wasting water" refers to letting any dropescape human use. "Wasted water" is water not diverted out of the riverand used. Another important aspect of the concept of "beneficial use" isthat an exclusive set of uses is delineated as "beneficial." Significantly,water used to maintain ecological habitats is not included; indeed, it wasnot until recently that environmental groups have lobbied for environmentalconsiderations to be stipulated with water allotments.

The principle of "beneficial use" and the idea that any drop not used is"wasted" are reflected in the blank space we find on maps, emphasizingthat water really would be wasted if it reached the barren land void of acivilization across the border. This logic can also be traced to the rhetoricaround the construction of the first dams on the river.

As the Colorado River Flows Merrily out to Sea ...

[In] no part of the wide world is there a place where Nature hasprovided so perfectly for a stupendous achievement by means ofirrigation as in that place where the Colorado River flows uselesslypast the international desert which Nature intended for its bride.Sometime the wedding of the waters will be celebrated, and thechild of that union will be a new civilization.

—WILLIAM ELLSWORTH SMYTHE (1900: 293–294)

When the preceding passage was written in 1900, the building of the greatdams on the Colorado River was just beginning to be imagined, but theidea that the river would be "useless" past the international border wasclearly already firmly established. One of the ways the concept of "waste"was articulated in the early literature on the Colorado River was throughthe idea that nature, left to its own devices, was inherently wasteful. Forexample, in "The Story of a Great Government Project for the Conquestof the Colorado River," an informational pamphlet published by theBoulder Dam Association in 1928, the Colorado River was characterizedin the following way: "Today the Colorado, on the one hand, is an everincreasing flood menace and, on the other, a notorious waster of its preciouscargo of water so desperately needed in that region through which itpasses" (Boulder Dam Association 1928: 1).

The idea here that the river wastes its own water simply by letting it flowits course is replete throughout the literature on the dams. William Smythe(quoted in the epigraph for this section), who was the chairman of theNational Irrigation Congress in 1900, further develops the idea of nature'swastefulness by way of an economic metaphor: "dark, deep water [flows]uselessly to the ocean past an empire that has waited for centuries to feelthe thrill of its living touch. It is like a stream of golden dollars whichspendthrift Nature pours into the sea" (Smythe 1900: 288).

By suggesting that Nature is "spendthrift," spending "money" extravagantlyand wastefully, Smythe elaborates another important sense of"waste" by drawing on the analogy between water and money. Versions ofthis metaphor are still rampant in the West. A famous saying in the southwesternUnited States is that "in the West, water runs uphill towardsmoney," and metaphors of water as "liquid gold" or as a "liquid asset" arestrikingly naturalized among many residents of the Colorado's watershed.Therefore, Smythe's metaphor foregrounded the controversy on the riverover whether water should be treated as a commodity, owned by individuals,or a commons, that communities have rights to (Reisner 1993; Shiva2002; Worster 1992).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Where the River Ends by SHAYLIH MUEHLMANN. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822354438
• ISBN 13: 9780822354437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240