“To Come of Age in a Dry Place”: Infrastructures of Irrigated Agriculture in the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands

In the Mexico-U.S. borderlands the social uses of water are changing as the focus of the economy shifts slowly from agriculture to industry and services. This article discusses the changes to the physical and social infrastructures erected during the first half of the twentieth century to support a regime of accumulation based in irrigated cotton. Infrastructure is proposed as a particularly useful concept for drawing connections between these social, economic and cultural changes, and emphasizing their materiality. The article draws upon the Social Structures of Accumulation and Regulation School literatures to explain the dynamics revealed through historical and ethnographic research in an irrigation district in northeastern Mexico. This analysis helps contextualize current conflicts over water use in the borderlands, and serves as a corrective for the overly symbolic approaches common to the “borderlands” literature. “Can we resolve the past, lurking jaws, joints of time? The Base. To come of age in a dry place.”—Jim Morrison The Mexico-U.S. border region is defined by aridity. Like the societies that occupied this space before us, our borderlands society is based on the manipulation of water. During the twentieth century hydraulic infrastructure changed the landscape of the borderlands dramatically and irrevocably. The rivers and aquifers of the borderlands were dammed, channeled, straightened, pumped and stored, to the point where very little of the original riverine dynamics remains. These water sources were put to use irrigating vast extensions of land, and these irrigation systems were home to hundreds of thousands of colonists and immigrants. While mention of the Mexico-U.S. border usually evokes images of fences, maquiladoras and urban sprawl, the borderlands was built on irrigated agriculture. Today, that history still shapes all aspects of regional life: its production, economy, laws, institutions, infrastructure, people, social organization and culture. This article treats the history and present crisis of irrigated agriculture in the borderlands of northern Mexico. In these pages I show that borderlands society was built in the first part of the twentieth century based on irrigation works and cotton production, and that irrigated agriculture is being displaced by industry, services and other activities as the motor of the region’s economy. This is a story of how an agricultural regime of accumulation, and the different physical and social