Irrigating the Revolution: The Politics of Water in Bolivia’s National Revolution, 1952–64

In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, peasants and reformers across Latin America pushed for radical agrarian reform to address extreme disparities in rural land ownership and an end to colonaje, forced labor and service on large land estates. These struggles were often successful, especially in Mexico and Bolivia where peasants fought national revolutions to bring these transformations about. While scholars have long been interested in the popular efforts to bring about agrarian reform, less attention has been paid to peasant fights for water to irrigate the fields they had won and little thought at all has been given to urban demands for water during these revolutions. This article-in-progress explores rural and urban struggles over water during the period of Bolivia’s 1952 National Revolution. It grows out of a chapter from my book project on the history of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia from the 1870s to early 2000s, "Dividing the Waters: How Power, Property and Protest Transformed the Waterscape of Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1879-2016," but expands on that work to look at demands for water during the revolutionary period on a national level. I find that not only was water central to the grievances that led peasants to rebel, they successfully forced the national government to redistribute water to their unions and communities, often at the expense of cities vying for the same water sources. Water struggles thus became key spaces of mobilization, articulation of rights, and contention, both between the revolutionary government and its supporters as well as among urban and rural revolutionary forces themselves.