Mexico City's Water Supply

Mexico City's Water Supply
Author: The Joint Academies Committee on the Mexico City Water Supply
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 1995-05-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309587948

This book addresses the technical, health, regulatory, and social aspects of ground water withdrawals, water use, and water quality in the metropolitan area of Mexico City, and makes recommendations to improve the balance of water supply, water demand, and water conservation. The study came about through a nongovernmental partnership between the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council and the Mexican Academies of Science and Engineering. The book will contain a Spanish-language translation of the complete English text.

Water for All

Water for All
Author: Sarah T. Hines
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520381637

Water for All chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, which is known for acute water scarcity and explosive water protests. Sarah T. Hines examines conflict and compromises over water from the 1870s to the 2010s, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Analyzing a wide variety of sources, from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, Hines investigates how water dispossession in the late nineteenth century and reclaimed water access in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prompted, shaped, and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements. The struggle for democratic control over water culminated in the successful 2000 Water War, a decisive turning point for Bolivian politics. This story offers lessons for contemporary resource management and grassroots movements about how humans can build equitable, democratic, and sustainable resource systems in the Andes, Latin America, and beyond.

Watering the Revolution

Watering the Revolution
Author: Mikael D. Wolfe
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2017-06-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822373068

In Watering the Revolution Mikael D. Wolfe transforms our understanding of Mexican agrarian reform through an environmental and technological history of water management in the emblematic Laguna region. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico and the United States, Wolfe shows how during the long Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) engineers’ distribution of water paradoxically undermined land distribution. In so doing, he highlights the intrinsic tension engineers faced between the urgent need for water conservation and the imperative for development during the contentious modernization of the Laguna's existing flood irrigation method into one regulated by high dams, concrete-lined canals, and motorized groundwater pumps. This tension generally resolved in favor of development, which unintentionally diminished and contaminated the water supply while deepening existing rural social inequalities by dividing people into water haves and have-nots, regardless of their access to land. By uncovering the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were ecologically unsustainable, Wolfe tells a cautionary tale of the long-term consequences of short-sighted development policies.

Water, Food and Welfare

Water, Food and Welfare
Author: Rosario H. Perez-Espejo
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2016-03-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319288245

This book addresses the following topics: the contemporary model for water management and alternative approaches; the socioeconomic framework, water policy and institutions; water use for food purposes, water-resources inventory and irrigation; manifestations of welfare loss and water prices; change in dietary patterns and water security; hydrological stress and pressures on water availability; groundwater management problems; vulnerability and climate change; water demand of major crops; gray water footprint and water pollution; gray water footprint and mining; virtual water and food trade; estimates of the water footprint of four key cereals, forage, livestock and bottled drinks. It is the result of a cooperation between 16 researchers from eleven Mexican academic institutions.

Virtuous Waters

Virtuous Waters
Author: Casey Walsh
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520965396

At free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Virtuous Waters is a pathbreaking and innovative study of bathing, drinking and other everyday engagements with a wide range of waters across five centuries in Mexico. Casey Walsh uses political ecology to bring together an analysis of shifting scientific, religious and political understandings of waters and a material history of social formations, environments, and infrastructures. The book shows that while modern concepts and infrastructures have come to dominate both the hydrosphere and the scholarly literature on water, longstanding popular understandings and engagements with these heterogeneous liquids have been reproduced as part of the same process. Attention to these dynamics can help us comprehend and confront the water crisis that is coming to a head in the twenty-first century.

Land, Liberty, and Water

Land, Liberty, and Water
Author: Salvador Salinas
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816539014

Following the death of Emiliano Zapata in 1919, the Zapatistas continued to lead the struggle for land reform. Land, Liberty, and Water offers a political and environmental history of the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution by examining the outcomes of the insurgency in the state of Morelos. Salvador Salinas takes readers inside the diverse pueblos of the former Zapatistas during the 1920s and 1930s and recounts the first statewide land reform carried out in postrevolutionary Mexico. Based on extensive archival research, he reveals how an alliance with the national government that began in 1920 stimulated the revival of rural communities after ten years of warfare and helped once-landless villagers reclaim Morelos’s valley soils, forested mountains, and abundant irrigation waters. During the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928), pueblos forged closer ties to the centralized government in Mexico City through a plethora of new national institutions, such as ejidos, forestry cooperatives, water juntas, credit societies, and primary schools. At the same time, the expansion of charcoal production in the Sierra de Ajusco and rice cultivation in the lowland valleys accelerated deforestation and intensified water conflicts. Salinas recounts how the federal reforms embraced by the countryside aided the revival of the pueblos, and in return, villagers repeatedly came to the defense of an embattled national regime. Salinas gives readers interested in modern Mexico, the Zapatista revolution, and environmental history a deeply researched analysis of the outcomes of the nation’s most famous revolutionary insurgency.

A Land Between Waters

A Land Between Waters
Author: Christopher R. Boyer
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816599505

Mexico is one of the most ecologically diverse nations on the planet, with landscapes that range from rainforests to deserts and from small villages to the continent’s largest metropolis. Yet historians are only beginning to understand how people’s use of the land, extraction of its resources, and attempts to conserve it have shaped both the landscape and its inhabitants. A Land Between Waters explores the relationship between the people and the environment in Mexico. It heralds the arrival of environmental history as a major area of study within the field of Mexican history. This volume brings together a dozen original works of environmental history by some of the foremost experts in Mexican environmental history from both the United States and Mexico. The contributions collected in this seminal volume explore a wide array of topics, from the era of independence to the present day. Together they examine how humans have used, abused, and attended to nature in Mexico over more than two hundred years. Written in clear, accessible prose, A Land Between Waters showcases the breadth of Mexican environmental history in a way that defines the key topics in the field and suggests avenues for subsequent work. Most importantly, it assesses the impacts of environmental changes that Mexico has faced in the past with an eye to informing national debates about the challenges that the nation will face in the future.