| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin American

Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1999. pp. xiv, 199. $49.95.

This is a useful monograph. It returns scholarly attention to vital questions of water and resources at a time when historians of Mexico and elsewhere increasingly focus on cultural constructions and contests. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera reminds us that material processes provide the foundations on which political, social, and cultural constructions develop, often in conflictive ways. Her work on the Puebla region demonstrates that analysis focused on the interactions among ecological processes, social and political relations, and cultural constructions is essential to persuasive historical understanding. 1

Taking an ecological approach, this study outlines changing systems of cultivation and water control from conquest to independence. Historically, Mesoamerican and Hispanic legal cultures shared emphases on public communal water rights. An emerging Spanish trend toward private claims, however, gained impetus in sixteenth-century Puebla, serving Spaniards in the aftermath of conquest, when continued primacy for common rights would favor indigenous users. Disease-driven depopulation also facilitated Spanish land and water acquisition. Into the seventeenth century, there was water enough for most indigenous survivors, and for Spaniards developing estates to grow wheat for Puebla and Mexico City. The first two colonial centuries created a Spanish system of private landholding and water rights alongside an adapting, surviving, indigenous system of communal rights. . . .

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