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Conflict and Cooperation: Water, Floods, and Social Response in Colonial Guanajuato, Mexico
Georgina H. Endfield, Isabel Fernández Tejedo and Sarah L. O'Hara
| DROUGHTS AND FLOODS are as much social constructions as physical occurrences. In recent years, historians have begun to explore the ways natural disasters are in fact shaped by human actions.1 Geographers also have produced a large literature on the effects of natural hazards and rare or extreme events, and how the scale of impact can be determined as much by prevailing social, economic, and political circumstances as by the event itself.2 To date much of the work by scholars in both disciplines has focused on the recent past and the present. To provide a deeper historical perspective on the social construction of droughts and floods, this article explores the response to those events in Guanajuato, Mexico, from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. |
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Guanajuato is an important case study for a number of reasons. First, it forms part of the Bajío, a lowland area in the central highlands (mesa central) of the country and an area subject to variations from year to year in precipitation, droughts, and floods.3 Second, although the Bajío, at the time of Spanish contact, as a whole represented something of a frontier zone—only the southernmost areas being permanently occupied—the area developed rapidly into a thriving agricultural, mining, and commercial center in the colonial period. The Bajío also was the birthplace of the agrarian unrest and revolt that fueled the Mexican independence movement. The social bases of this violence have been investigated elsewhere.4 But the way in which people in the region conceptualized, were affected by, and responded to changes in water availability, extreme weather, and disaster within a context of resource inequality, agrarian dissent, and social unrest remains to be explored in detail. Third, because of the region's economic, social, and political importance during the colonial period, there are particularly rich archival records available with which to investigate this theme. |
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Because Guanajuato was a scene of agrarian unrest, our work provides new insights into the history of agrarian insurgency in colonial Mexico. The historical literature makes clear the importance of considering cultural and structural factors and of incorporating analyses of the actions, powers, and adaptations of elites, states, and the agrarian masses.5 The significance of environmental change and climatic parameters as "triggers" of social unrest and change also has been highlighted.6 Less explored is the degree to which divergent "environmental knowledges" between social groups might have helped fuel and frame class struggles and agrarian unrest. Moreover, as Riley has recently illustrated, the literature regarding interactions between social strata in colonial Mexico, specifically Indian and Hispanic groups, has concentrated almost exclusively on conflicts over distribution and use of natural resources and labor demands, although shared environmental concerns actually may have transcended differential power relationships.7 This article suggests that intensification of class conflict was not the only result of drought and flood. In some cases, these events stimulated cooperation among different social groups. |
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Data Sources and Methodology | |
| HISTORICAL RECORDS charting the effects of extreme events, coping strategies, technological adaptation, regulation, and recovery, long have been recognized as valuable sources for investigating how people have perceived, been affected by, and reacted to a variety of environmental changes. Travel accounts and descriptions, legal documents, crop and tax records, and maps, paintings and images, for example, all have been used to identify the timing of anomalous weather and extreme events and to chart their effects and societal responses to them.8 |
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