El desarrollo cognitivo en contexto de pobreza o privación

This study encompasses areas within two regions in Mexico (Figure 1.5): the “Huasteca Potosina,” in the southeastern part of the state of San Luis Potosí, and the “Sierra Norte de Oaxaca,” in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca. In this section I will discuss to what extent the study’s findings may be generalized findings; in other words, how far beyond the boundaries of my study areas do the geographic characteristics vital to the hypothesis extend? (Besides the commonalities described here, the Huasteca and Oaxaca study regions also present illuminating contrasts which will discuss in chapter 2). I stress that while the “water source” is the main subject of this study, in a broader sense this geographic feature is only intended to serve as an example of the evolving relations among indigenous individuals, villages, and the state. Some of the findings of this study may apply to other geographic features and natural resources other than water, and also to certain countries beyond Mexico. These findings may therefore be applied beyond the zone which I delimit in this section.

1.4.1 Water-rich, indigenous, social-property-dominated regions of Mexico

Being within the geographic research tradition of cultural ecology, this study involves the spatially local links between humans and water sources. More specifically, this study is

concerned with social property, which in Mexico was a system developed overwhelmingly in rural areas (although the expansion of some metropolitan areas into ejidos has engendered issues not examined here). Therefore, the “first cut” in narrowing the area of applicability is to identify rural, but inhabited, places in Mexico (Figure 1.5), which I did by displaying all the localidades (rural census tract points) in the 2005 national census (INEGI 2005b). Each point represents a rural population center, as large as a town of 2,000 inhabitants or as small as an isolated

pattern, continuous in some places and disjunct or web-like in others. The true desert areas of Coahuila state, the Pinacate-Altar region of Sonora, and the Baja Peninsula are visibly less densely inhabited, as are the three remaining tropical forest frontiers (internal colonization fronts) of Chimalapas (the southern half of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec), the Lacandon region of Chiapas state, and the Calakmul region of Campeche state.

Rainfall patterns in Mexico are complex at both regional and local scales (West and Augelli 1989, 38), but can be simplified to three major classes: “water-rich” areas (where the

Figure 1.5. Mexico: Inhabited rural areas, and areas with relatively high year-round or seasonal rainfall (Sources: INEGI 2005b; Sheffield, Wood, and Munoz-Arriola 2010).

winter dry season is shorter than about four months, and/or rainstorms are relatively frequent even in the dry season); “seasonally water-rich” areas (where the contrast between the dry and rainy seasons is especially pronounced, corresponding to the approximate extent of Köppen potential vegetation type “Aw”); and “water-poor” areas, generally where subtropical high pressure dominates over trade wind patterns for most of the year, as well as a few orographic rain-shadow zones further south (Sauer and Brand 1932, 59). I based the distribution of the areas in Figure 1.5 on a map showing “a high resolution (~ 10km) dataset of evapotranspiration for Mexico for 1984-2006 based on remote sensing data” (Sheffield, J., E. F. Wood, and F. Munoz- Arriola, 2010, 271). My water-rich areas correspond to an average evaporation rate of more than 2.0 millimeters per day, while my water-poor areas correspond to a rate of less than 1.0

millimeters per day. The familiar wet and dry areas of Mexico are well illustrated, from the most general pattern of “north=dry, south=wet,” to regional-scale patterns such as the orographic rainfall belt along the Sierra Madre Oriental (including its extension as the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca). The principal effect of these patterns on agricultural potential is that “water poor” places generally require irrigation for any crops other than subsistence milpa (the traditional corn-beans-squash complex), while some “seasonally water rich” places will also require irrigation for certain crops.

To better define the areas where local formal systems of water allocation rights are probably uncommon, I produced a second map (Figure 1.6) which shows only southern Mexico. In this map, the three wetness classes – “water rich,” “seasonally water rich,” and “water poor” – are repeated from the first map, except that now they are shown so that the areas which most closely resemble the study regions (that is, mainly “water rich,” and a few areas of “seasonally water rich”) are shown in white or light gray stipple. In this map, a new variable, irrigation, enhances our understanding. Areas with more than 10 percent of farmland “equipped for irrigation” around the year 2000 (though not necessarily irrigated), according to a map republished by the FAO (Siebert et al. 2007), are shown in gray. Most of these are within the “seasonally water rich” zones, including two areas near the Oaxaca geodata analysis area (part of the Central Valley to the southwest, and part of the Tehuacan Valley to the northwest), and one large area near the Huasteca geodata analysis area (the Gulf plain to the northeast, centered on where the states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and San Luis Potosí meet). If climate change causes a

local decrease in rainfall, and/or if economic incentives cause a local increase in highly irrigated export crops, places adjacent to these areas may be most likely to develop locally accepted water allocation systems where none traditionally existed.

Figure 1.6. Southern Mexico: Inhabited rural areas with relatively high year-round or seasonal rainfall; and, areas with more than 10 percent farmland equipped for irrigation in 2000 (Sources: Sheffield, Wood, and Munoz-Arriola 2010; Siebert et al. 2007).

The third and final map of the extent of the study’s most direct applicability introduces two new variables: social property and indigeneity (Figure 1.6). (The areas in Figure 1.6 which are either “water poor,” or “>10 percent agricultural area irrigated,” or both, are shown in black in Figure 1.7, as these areas do not pertain directly to this study).

Figure 1.7. Southern Mexico: Municipios dominated by social property (ejidos and comunidades), and municipios dominated by speakers of indigenous languages (Sources: INEGI 2005b; INEGI 2006a; INEGI 2006b).

The full extent of social property in Mexico is surprisingly difficult to map. Figure 1.7 presents a reasonable approximation of social property at the municipio scale. I produced this coverage in ArcGIS by first joining the table of total núcleos in each county who had completed some degree of PROCEDE survey work by 2006 (INEGI 2006b) to the 2005 INEGI county shapefile. I created a field for the count of localidades within each county, and a final field of the ratio of PROCEDE núcleos to this count. There are three potential sources of inaccuracy:

localidades are not a perfect proxy for “núcleos and non-social-property villages”; the

PROCEDE table does not include the approximately 7 percent of social property villages which had not done any PROCEDE surveying; and some municipios with large areas may be only partly dominated by social property.

I mapped indigenous areas by municipio, using the proxy variable “population 5 years or older who speak an indigenous languages” (INEGI 2006a), by calculating the ratio of this variable to “total population 5 years or older.”

To the extent that this study focuses specifically on indigenous water-rich areas of Mexico, the region of greatest applicability appears as both gray and stippled in Figure 1.6. The notable regions include the rest of the upland (western) Huasteca region extending southeast of the study region, into Hidalgo and Veracruz states; a few smaller parts of Oaxaca state, including part of the Mixe-speaking area; most of the Chiapas Highlands, especially in the northern half of that state; and an extensive area shared by the states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo.

More broadly, the current study pertains to water-rich social properties of all ethnic types, indigenous and otherwise. As depicted in Figure 1.7, this enlarges the zone of applicability to include most of Veracruz state, significant parts of Guerrero state, and smaller areas within other states, including the “Zona Media” region of San Luis Potosí state, west of the Huasteca region.

1.4.2 Current trends impacting the study areas as potentially important sources of water

In section 1.3 I explained why only a restricted number of places in well-watered regions of Mexico currently serve as important sources of medium- and long-distance engineered water

transport. In this sub-section I consider the possibility that climate change or other factors could increase the number of such places.

Three factors could increase the value of water in the study areas, especially in when combined: decreased rainfall in nearby areas, high population growth in nearby cities, and a steep increase in water-intensive export agriculture or rural industry (e.g., a commercial distillery) in a village or one near it. (A fourth possible factor, greater demand for commercial bottled water from clean mountain springs, would have only scattered and localized impacts.10)

Figures 1.8 and 1.9 show how three recent, well-regarded studies predict that global climate change will affect the regional availability of water. “Projections for changes in precipitation patterns are extremely complex, involving a high degree of uncertainty and large heterogeneity” (IPCC 2007); furthermore, the SEMARNAT/CONAGUA water stress prediction takes into account expected change in human demand and consumption, not just climate change. These uncertainties are reflected in the maps: while IPCC and Arnell agree that southern Mexico (particularly Yucatan and northern Chiapas) will probably experience a sharp decrease in water availability, especially in summer months, there are also disagreements among the studies. IPCC specifies that the entire Sierra Madre Occidental and Mesa Central regions will suffer the

greatest decrease in winter precipitation, while SEMARNAT/CONAGUA predict that the border states of northern Mexico will experience a greater increase in water stress than elsewhere. The overall impression is that much of relatively wet southern Mexico will see a steeper decline in rainfall, but that relatively dry northern Mexico will undergo greater water stress due to factors other than rainfall, such as dependence on aquifers, higher population growth, and more widespread export agriculture. According to this, the Huasteca Potosina and Sierra Norte de Oaxaca regions fall somewhere in the middle of these extremes. Some contend that, overall, social property farmers are more likely to suffer crop failures than private property farmers (Liverman 1990, 66).

10 _{Not considered here is a factor which essentially increases the value of naturally transported clean water:} payments for environmental services (PESs) granted from the state to private or social property landowners for their willingness to conserve forest vegetation in watersheds where clean, abundant water downstream is regarded as important. I review this subject in chapter 4.

The growth of urban areas within or near the study areas is unlikely to be an important factor in regional water demand, but it could affect a few núcleos. Four cities are within 100 km of the geodata analysis areas, and downhill from part of them: Oaxaca city (10 km southeast of the Oaxaca area); Tuxtepec, Oaxaca (20 km north of it); Ciudad Valles (within the Huasteca area); and Tampico, Tamaulipas (100 km east of it). Oaxaca is the largest of these, with almost 600,000 inhabitants in 2010; it is followed by Tampico, with about 300,000; then Ciudad Valles,

Figure 1.8. Mexico: Projected relative changes in precipitation during period 2090-2099 compared to 1980-1999, according to SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) scenario A1B (adapted from IPCC 2007).

with about 170,000; and Tuxtepec, with about 100,000. Between 2005 and 2010, Oaxaca and Ciudad Valles experienced high population growth (9.2 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively), while Tuxtepec’s growth rate was modest (1.3 percent), and Tampico’s population actually declined, by 2.1 percent (INEGI 2010). It is conceivable, then, that a handful of núcleos in the

Figure 1.9. Mexico: Predicted change in water availability by CONAGUA administrative region, and according to IPCC scenario A1 (2050 as percentage of period 1961-1990). (Adapted from SEMARNAT 2007 and Arnell 2004).

northern extreme of the Huasteca geodata analysis area, and/or the southern extreme of the Oaxaca one,11 could face an urban demand for their water akin to what Axocopa experienced (section 1.2).

The growth of water-intensive export agriculture in and around the study areas is not easy to predict, and in any case will never be as important a demand on local water supplies as it increasingly is in drier (and more U.S.-proximate) northern Mexico. It is potentially an important enough factor to merit some examination: observations on Mexican export agriculture trends in general, followed by an overview of water-intensive crops specific to the study areas. For the first ten years after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, Mexican agricultural exports to the United States more than doubled, while yearly increases have been more modest since 2003 (Villareal 2010, 13; Wilder and Whiteford 2006, 353). Vegetables and fruits whose exports have increased the most are sweet peppers, cauliflower/broccoli, carrots/turnips, lemons/limes, and watermelons (Yuñez Naude and Taylor 2006, 174). Export agriculture has been most intense in irrigated zones of northern Mexico such as Torreon (in Coahuila state) and parts of Sinaloa state. Of the aforementioned crops, only lemons/limes require intense water use, and are thus more commonly grown in high-rainfall areas such as the Gulf Coastal Plain.

The following account combines recent data from Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2010, 17-20) on water demand of different crops, Yuñez Naude and Taylor (2006, 178) on annual average production of Mexico’s major exported vegetable and fruits, and INAFED (2007) on the important agricultural products of study area municipios.

Sugar cane, coffee, and rice are products which are medium-high to high water

demanding, and grown in the study areas, but are not increasingly significant Mexican exports.

11 _{In the Central Valley around Oaxaca City, irrigation from Río Atoyac and Río Salado floodwaters – barriers} built to curb overland flow – are supplemented by shallow wells and rain-fed farming. “The history of water use in the Central Valley is one of increasing abstraction [i.e., extraction] at the outer edge of the drainage network leading to a decrease in water availability downstream in the Atoyac itself. More and more water has been taken from the perennial tributaries at their points of entry into the valley. Water has been used upstream of Oaxaca City in the Etla Valley by increasing the use of the high water-table zone and extending and modernizing canal systems. Abstraction has been multiplied many times over by the increasing number of wells with mechanical pumps, to the point that groundwater reserves are threatened” (Clarke 2000, 94).

Avocados, oranges, and pineapples are products which are grown in the study areas, and are increasingly significant Mexican exports, but which have only low to moderate water demands.

The only agricultural products which meet all three criteria – medium-high to high water demand, grown in significant quantities within or near the study areas, and increasingly

significant as an export crop – are mangos and lemons/limes.12 In the Huasteca Potosina, the commercial mango crop centers on Coxcatlán, between Tancanhuitz and Axtla de Terrazas (in Figure 2.2, on page 49). In the lowlands bordering the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca, the lime crop is concentrated around Jacatepec, about 15 km northeast of Valle Nacional, and around Choapam (in Figure 2.5, on page 56), while mango is grown most intensively around Choapam, as well as around Jocotepec, just 5 km from the RAN document study núcleo of San Miguel Lachixola. These portions of the geodata analysis areas have the greatest potential as future importers of medium-scale water transport using sources located within certain núcleo territories considered in this study.

12 _{Just beyond the Oaxaca study area, the county of Valle Nacional was, during the Porfiriato era, notorious for} the indentured servitude on its tobacco plantations (Turner 1909-1923). Tobacco is another high-water-demand crop, with moderate export growth potential; however, in the study areas, the quantity grown is a fraction of that of a century ago.