The Treasure More Precious than Gold: Indigenous Water Struggles and Peasant Politics in 17th-Century New Spain

In the Central and Southern Mexican highlands, rivers form an intricate web binding ecosystems and human settlements. Pre-Hispanic Indigenous societies engineered complex water infrastructures providing fresh drinking water and irrigation. They also revered water as a source of cosmic energy, a link to the divine, and a force of both life and destruction. Spanish conquest introduced fundamental changes to these systems, especially as economic enterprises competed with Indigenous subsistence farmers for limited water supplies. Spanish colonialism also introduced a new legal system through which Indigenous communities struggled to retain control and access to their water, though they also turned to strategies of self-sufficiency, direct action, and violent confrontation to defend their natural resources. This dissertation compares Indigenous water struggles in Puebla and Oaxaca between 1590-1730. Using the theories of peasant politics and resistance (articulated by Eric Wolf and James Scott), hegemony (by Antonio Gramsci), and Ideological State Apparatuses (by Louis Althusser), it explores how Indigenous peasant communities (pueblos) deployed various legal and extralegal tactics to selectively adapt to and resist profound seventeenth-century transformations. In Puebla, Nahua pueblos achieved enduring entanglements with their Hispanic neighbors through complex water distribution agreements. Conflicts in this region were characterized by relatively few instances of violence but a significant amount of political maneuvering, leveraging a myriad of alliances. In Oaxaca, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Mixe pueblos confronted few colonists but endured repressive Spanish appointees who engaged in blatant profiteering of Indigenous labor and resources. Indigenous Oaxacans responded to this perceived corruption by turning to self-sufficiency and visible displays of protest and violence to defend their natural resources. This comparative analysis reveals how pueblos fundamentally shaped Spanish hegemony through their decisions to adapt to or resist colonial policy and economic development. It shows that water was more than just a natural resource, but a critical component of political power and generational wisdom with which pueblos built generational endurance to outside pressures. Overall, it demonstrates how pueblos articulated a localized independence and sovereignty over their natural resources within the Spanish Empire through communal solidarity, collective action, and a commitment to their cultural ties to their landscape.