Dammed and Flooded: The Papaloapan River Project and the Morality of Nativist Environmentalism in Oaxaca

When the modernist state redesigns the landscape of an entire watershed, as in Mexico’s Papaloapan River Basin Project, what new configurations of power and morality take hold? And what do these re-configurations tell us about the meaning of the modernist state in rural regions of the postcolonial world?  My paper examines the practices and discourses associated with the Papaloapan River Basin Projects, which began in 1947 and continued through the construction of the Cerro de Oro Dam in 1972. By the 1970s and 1980s, new moral discourses of nativist environmentalism emerged from the scarred and flooded landscape. With that shift, local and national actors reworked the state’s modernization narratives into romantic and popular notions of native environmental stewardship.  My paper demonstrates how the new morality of nativist environmentalism that emerged in the wake of failed development schemes was entangled in national debates over indigenous politics.

Are environmentalist critiques really about the supposed “failure” to steward the land, or are they about something else?  During the 1970s, while the Mexican state renewed its commitment to large-scale irrigation projects to promote development in the tropics of Oaxaca and Veracruz, a critical discourse emerged from anthropologists concerned with the loss of indigenous culture, as well as from indigenous activists who decried the destruction of their environments that resulted from government irrigation and fertilization programs.  In the aftermath of that critical turning point, the Papaloapan Commission was disbanded in the early 1980s and Zapotec, Chinantec, and Mixtec indigenous groups challenged state developmentalist policies by promoting small-scale “sustainable development” projects.  My paper describes the historical processes through which a language of environmental stewardship became politically salient in southern Mexico as government efforts to control and manage water resources faltered.