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Rescaling Irrigation in Latin

America: The Cultural Images and
Political Ecology of Water Resources
Article in Ecumene · April 2000

DOI: 10.1191/096746000701556680
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RESCALING IRRIGATION IN LATIN
AMERICA: THE CULTURAL IMAGES
AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF
WATER RESOURCES
Karl S. Zimmerer
A pair of scales – local canal-based (or village-based) and basin-scale (or valley-wide) – is
featured in the irrigation of the mountain landscapes of Latin America. These scales arose
historically through the interplay of cultural images with the political ecologies of agrarian
transformation. In the Cochabamba region of Bolivia, long the irrigated breadbasket of the
south-central Andes, the Inca state (c. 1495–1539) imposed canal-based irrigation using a
powerful concept of rotational sharing (suyu). Valley basins containing local irrigation were
a part of the territorial web of Inca state geography known later as verticality. The Spanish
empire in Andean South America (1539–1825) was predicated upon a valley-centric colonial
geography. Colonial rescaling involved despoliation and usurpation of waterworks, legal
actions, and struggles over environmental change. Influence of the two irrigation scales has
persisted. Today canal-based irrigation is not a timeless relict of indigenous customs, pace
many postcolonial projects. Rather its usefulness, and its remarkable reinvention as a cul-
tural concept and environmental creation, are the products of major modifications.
Dismantling of multi-scale linkages in irrigation has reduced indigenous or peasant cross-
scale co-ordination. Local containment poses threats to the environmental and socio-
economic sustainability of canal-based irrigation.
G eographical images of distinct scales support the widespread utilization and

continued expansion of irrigated landscapes for farming in Latin America.
Planners, farmers and aid officials have relied primarily on a pair of mental pic-
tures to guide the making of irrigation works. One image is focused on the orga-
nization of water resources at the local scale. Local irrigation refers to
community-based or village-based management, which often is coordinated
along a main canal. Many local, canal-based irrigation works are called juntas,
although such indigenous names as suyus and ceques are used avidly in western
South America (Peru, Bolivia). Local irrigation in Latin America is widely pro-
moted by development projects that are identified as ‘grassroots’, ‘local’, and
Ecumene 2000 7 (2) 0967-4608(00)EU187OA © 2000 Arnold

Rescaling irrigation in Latin America 151
‘sustainable’. During the past 10–15 years the image of local canal- or commu-
nity-based irrigation has been widely diffused, including in major irrigation areas
such as the Guadalajara-Querétaro region of Mexico, the Colca valley region of
Peru, and the Cochabamba region of Bolivia.1 Rights to canal-based irrigation
are often managed by a community or water users’ group, while the creation of
water markets is increasingly common in these arrangements.
A second mental picture is that of irrigated landscapes at the scale of the
basin or valley bottom. Basin irrigation typically is based on the centralized con-
trol of several primary canals that cover a larger area than single canal-based
waterworks. The basin image, like that of local canal-based irrigation, has been
used as a mental guide, although the actual forms of basin irrigation have usu-
ally differed somewhat from the ideal type. Fee arrangements and water mar-
kets are typical of this type of irrigation. Development projects offering this style
of irrigation warrant the labels of western, modern and global. The manage-
ment of water resources at the scale of basins (and closely related units like sub-
basins and multiple basins) has been characteristic of modern development in
Latin America. Project sites for the basin-scale management of water resources
include the Guadalajara–Querétaro region of Mexico (for example, the Santiago
and Autlan basins), the Colca valley region of Peru (the Majes sub-basin), and
the Cochabamba region of Bolivia (the Central Valley basin).2
This study considers how local canal-based and valley-basin irrigation were
shaped by the combined processes of social conflict and co-operation, political
contestation and consolidation, and human environmental change. Irrigation
geographies are taken to comprise both cultural pictures and material ecologi-
cal and social constructs. Of special interest is how interconnected mental and
socio-environmental processes have produced the distinct scaling of irrigation.
I focus on the making of irrigated landscapes in the Andean countries of west-
ern South America during the rule of this world region by paramount world
powers, with special reference to the Inca state (c. 1400–1532) and the early
Spanish colonial empire (1532–1650). I argue that a multi-faceted series of strug-
gles and temporary resolutions led to the rescaling of irrigation between the
1400s and the 1600s. At that time the twin images of irrigation – local canal-
based and basin scale – acquired an influence that has persisted with modifica-
tion until today.
The location of my case study of irrigated landscapes and scale is the greater
Cochabamba region of central Bolivia (Figure 1). This so-called ‘heartland’ of
Bolivia is a tropical highland region of the Andes mountains that occupies inter-
mediate elevations between the westerly high Altiplano and the Andean pied-
mont and Amazon lowlands to the east. The environments of central Bolivia and
the Cochabamba region consist of scattered mountain basins at 2000–3000 m.
and extensive upland settings. Long one of the most irrigated regions of South
America, Cochabamba served under the Inca state and then the early Spanish
colonial empire as the famed bread-basket of the south-central Andes. During
these periods the irrigators and administrative rulers drew on a variety of men-
tal images, ecological functions, and social organizations. Among the scales of
irrigation the most salient were the local canal-based scale and the scale of the
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

152 Karl S. Zimmerer
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Figure 1 ~ The central and south-central Andes of Peru and Bolivia. (The inset map
shows central Bolivia and the greater Cochabamba region.) During Inca rule (c.
1425–1532) the areas on the main map were the state territories of Collasuyu and
Antisuyu. Under the Spanish empire (c. 1532–1825) the areas shown here belonged to
the Alto Peru (‘High Peru’) subdivision of the Peruvian viceroyalty.
valley basin. As will be seen, the past scaling of irrigation under the Inca and
early Spanish world powers has been taken up in subsequent designs for irri-
gated agriculture and, most recently, in its joining with environmental conser-
vation.
Geographical scale and political ecology

The theme of scale is crucial to my study. I reject the a priori distinctions of
canal-based irrigation as purely local and basin-style irrigation as purely global.
Rather than a simple and fixed dichotomy of local–global, the making of irri-
gation is expected to involve a variety of key pheonomena – social actors and
practices, cultural ideas, political processes, environmental factors and flows –
that take place at several scales. Equally important, the relations of these
causative phenomena across scales suggest the linkages of different identifiable
scales. This insight, presented in the second section, leads my case study to scale
up and scale down in order to comprehend more fully the making of local canal-
based waterworks as well as basin-style irrigation.
A political ecology perspective on scale refers to the interface of human activ-
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

ities and the environment. Geographical political ecology focuses on socio-
natural scaling which occurs in the fusing of biogeophysical processes with
broadly social ones.3 I find that many ‘local–global’ studies tend to overlook the
conditioning of scale by geographical cultural ecology. Yet concrete expressions
of the human environment interface such as irrigation are definitely moulded
by human-shaped biogeophysical factors and flows. (Biogeophysical processes
vary from the directly human-induced to ones that are slightly or indirectly
altered by people.) This recognition leads my case study to incorporate those
environmental changes and biogeophysical factors – including hydrologic,
sediment, and vegetation processes – that have affected people’s rescaling of
irrigation in Latin America. Emphasis on the making of scale suggests that the
irrigated landscape should be thought of as the product of both environmental
and broadly social processes that include the making of cultural images.
A primary significance of this study is its focus on the environmental politics
and political struggles that surround the practice of irrigation development.
Increasingly, the modern western style of irrigation development is held to be
culturally inappropriate, socially unjust and environmentally unsound.4 In
response, local canal-based irrigation has emerged as a main alternative that is
vigorously espoused by several hundreds of institutions throughout Latin
America and in many developing countries worldwide.5 ‘Grassroots’, ‘local’ and
‘sustainable development’, now being undertaken by these government agen-
cies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), are planning a marriage of
local canal-based irrigation and environmental conservation, with socioeco-
nomic success. Scale is central to their claims, since local irrigation tends to be
taken as an inherited relict that brings sufficient benefits to both the environ-
ment and the people that irrigate.
My findings challenge this assumption of the inherent character and viability
of local scale irrigation. Rather, I show that local-scale irrigation is steeped in
the selective adoption and alteration (together referred to as reinvention) of his-
torical customs and traditions of resource use. In the Andean countries these
formative historical geographies date to the Inca state and the early Spanish
colonial empire. As will be seen, the local scale of canal-based irrigation has
always depended on key linkages or articulations to processes that are differ-
ently scaled. Several such processes, both broadly social and environmental, have
typically tied local irrigation to basin-scale processes. These twin images should
therefore be seen as contrasts that frequently are interlinked.
This study is guided by ideas of scale that merge the perspectives of
‘local–global’ processes and geographical political ecology. The perspective on
scales of ‘local–global’ processes (or ‘glocalization’) is concerned with the
process-based scaling of sociospatial transformations that are part of so-called
globalization.6 Those processes taking place at the large extra-regional scales
referred to as global are typically associated with other processes that are scaled
over smaller areas and that are referred to as local. Though the popular yet mis-
guided notion of a rigid dualism of ‘local–global’ scales prompts the call for
rejection of the term, my study adopts it, along with the use of quotations. Here
‘local–global’ and ‘glocalization’ indicate the reference to a geographical
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

approach that is focused on sociospatial processes and multiple-level scaling.
Geographical political ecology is an approach or area of inquiry with a major
interest in scale concepts. This approach shows general similaraities to the sub-
fields of cultural and human ecology as well as hazards, geoarcheology, and land
use.7 A dialogue between geographical political ecology and the ‘local–global’
perspective on scale and scaling processes should avoid the one-way exchange
of ideas. Indeed whole-cloth importations tend to preclude the weaving or con-
necting together of ideas and concepts. Rather, I wish to advance an exchange
of ideas between a scale-sensitive ‘local–global’ perspective and geographical
political ecology.
The first exchange stems from the ‘local–global’ perspective on scaling and
territorializing. Scaling processes gain salience as people and institutions orga-
nize their capabilities through social power, conflict, and co-operation . The pre-
sent study shows how the scaling (or rescaling) of irrigation has depended on
the ‘scale capabilities’ of social actors (such as Inca subjects, the Inca state and
its provincial rulers, colonial Indians, Spanish colonists, and the Spanish colo-
nial administrators). Of equal importance is the scaling of the biogeophysical
irrigation environments. Indeed, differently scaled hydrologic, sediment, and
vegetation processes tended to aid, or be exploited by, diverse groups or indi-
vidual irrigators. Given these relations, the crucial scaling of the biogeophysical
processes of irrigation should be interwoven with the account of social forces.
A second exchange rests on the fuller awareness that the dynamism of
‘local–global’ processes was common during European colonialism and even
operated in various places during the periods of powerful pre-European states.8
‘Local–global’ interactions under the rule of colonial empires and pre-European
states periodically invoked the so-called cultural reinvention of traditions and
customs.9 Reinventions were used by the rulers and subjects of the new societies
as they sought to establish or resist new relations of social power, to give the
appearance of social cohesion or identity, and to create legitimacy for new insti-
tutions and status identities. Cultural reinvention, as a conspicuous feature of
‘local–global’ processes, may be similarly common in the realm of human–envi-
ronment relations.10 Indeed, reinventions of the image of irrigation (and espe-
cially its scale associations) were defining features of rule by the Inca state and
the early Spanish colonial empire.
Adjustments of irrigation ecologies coexisted with the rise of new cultural
images. People’s reworking of the ecologies of irrigation occurred through the
alteration of biogeophysical factors and flows. Hydrologic, sediment and vege-
tation processes became managed in different ways and acquired different scalar
properties. As discussed below, these socio-environcultural processes were inte-
grated under Inca rulers into a geographically extended and nested-type model
of territory and land use. By contrast, the Spanish colonial rulers sought to con-
solidate the management of environcultural processes in particular geographi-
cal areas, particularly the valley basins. These altered ecologies, and their allied
geographies, cooccurred alongside the metaphorical and cultural transforma-
tions of irrigation. In a broad sense, the colonial Spanish ecologies were insep-
arable from the reinvented images of irrigation, although to be sure the changes
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

did not always occur in simple tandem, since the space–time parameters of these
processes were complex.
Trenchant critiques of the approaches of ‘local,’ ‘grassroots’, and ‘sustainable
development’ also urge a dialogue between the ‘local–global’ perspective and
geographical political ecology. The ‘green lens’ of these projects, as Zerner calls
their environcultural emphasis, has tended to assume an overarching stability of
the processes that are viewed as the foundations of community resource man-
agement.11 Zerner and others use this insight to critique the frequent failure of
community-based conservation that purports to make use of customary law.
Their studies point out that misplaced or ill-founded assumptions of stability
also apply to alleged spatial fixity, including the crucial elements of territory
and scale.12 By adhering to preconceived ideas of ecological nature that bolster
a claim to the spatial and temporal stability of resources, many projects can
easily damage people and environments that are in or near management
areas.13
The actual making of local, canal-based irrigation, as shown in the case study
below, has been spatially dynamic and historically fluid. Periodic rescaling of
local canal-based irrigation was produced by social contestations and coopera-
tion. Change and alteration of biogeophysical factors and flows were also facets
of rescaling. Modified hydrologic, sediment and vegetation processes acted both
alone and in close concert with sociospatial changes to remake what constituted
the ‘local’ of irrigation. Here I believe a policy message must caution against
the prevalent notion, grounded in mistaken assumptions of stability, that local
irrigation tends to be relatively timeless and independent of differently scaled
processes.
Irrigation and the Cochabamba region: suyu and basin definitions

The making of past irrigation landscapes in Cochabamba cannot be separated
from current dilemmas. At present the greater Cochabamba region of central
Bolivia, as shown in the inset of Figure 1, is home to about 2 million people.
The majority of inhabitants are rural and semi-urban farmers and livestock-
raisers who work part-time, usually seasonally, in jobs in agro-industry and in
the vast informal sector of the Cochabamba urban area (1990 population
c. 900 000).14 Many people of Cochabamba speak Quechua as well as Spanish
while some also rely on the Aymara language. Cultural and livelihood practices
of the region’s cochabambinos are hybrid concoctions of diverse expressions.
Large numbers of people reside partly in Indian or peasant communities, while
they may also work for extended intervals in modern cities such as Cochabamba
or Santa Cruz, or foreign ones, including Buenos Aires and several in the United
States. Poverty and the lack of basic requirements are commonplace in
Cochabamba; living and working conditions are extremely difficult for the huge
majority of the population.
Irrigation-based agricultural development has been seized upon since the mid-
twentieth century as a main solution to poverty in Cochabamba. Since then a
large number of development agencies of international, national, and regional
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

governments have supported irrigation projects in the region. Neoliberal gov-
ernment cutbacks, decentralization policies, and worsening poverty since 1985
have spurred more than 200 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to under-
take projects in Cochabamba. Their recent projects tend to put a priority on
the attempt to fuse development with environcultural conservation.15 Local-scale
irrigation and environment-development objectives are nowadays a main com-
ponent of many ‘grassroots’, ‘local’ and ‘sustainable development’ projects.
Their interests in local canal-based irrigation are typically seen as supporting the
postcolonial alternatives of community autonomy and govern cultural decen-
tralization while opposing private interests and centralized state power. Projects
with these interests have become locally common in Cochabamba and elsewhere
in the Andean countries in the 1980s and the 1990s.16
Present-day irrigation projects of all types in Cochabamba, with the dilemmas
they face, are built upon existing irrigation practices. The social and environ-
mental history of irrigation in the region is extensive and influential, since mod-
erate to large numbers of farmers there have relied on irrigated agriculture for
at least 1200 years.17 Near Tarata, a provincial capital and the site of a major
pre-European irrigation works (Figure 1 inset), the practice of irrigating field
crops likely began as early as 1500 BC and thus may have been one of the earli-
est places of irrigated farming in the Americas. Under the Inca and Spaniards
the irrigated agriculture of Cochabamba was expanded and reorganized, solid-
ifying its identity as the chief bread-basket of the south-central Andes. The
materials used in my study of Cochabamba irrigation in the periods of Inca and
early Spanish colonial rule consisted of published accounts and unpublished
administrative and judicial documents (imperial, viceregal, and regional) that
date to the 1500s. The following case study considered these primary and
secondary historical sources in conjunction with environcultural analysis.
The widespread use of two terms led to their adoption in this case study. Local
canal-based irrigation in Cochabamba was referred to historically by the term
suyu (which still today is widely used). The designation suyu was used by
Quechua-speaking Inca administrators and colonists of Cochabamba and later
by colonial Indians and Spaniards. Suyu applied both to an image of irrigation
and to its actual area of operation. Ecologically and socially, the suyu in
Cochabamba was the organization of irrigation according to the cluster of fields
fed by a primary canal and managed according to this canal-based unit (Figures
2 and 3). In addition to irrigation, the term suyu also referred to the sociospa-
tial division of rights and responsibilities that attached to the management of
other resources, such as the co-ordinated rotation of fields and rangeland
through sectoral fallow.18
‘Basin’ refers to the valley floor or bottom-land that was a scale commonly
referred to in the images of Cochabamba irrigation. The English word ‘basin’
closely resembles the meanings of a variety of terms such as pampa and valle that
were used in speech and writing in Quechua and Spanish during the periods
of Inca and Spanish colonial rule. Pampa and valle, when the latter was applied
to Cochabamba irrigation and land use, were terms that typically designated the
entire floor or bottomland of the valley. The Valle Alto (High Valley) and Valle
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

El Paso
1
2
3 Sacaba
Quillacollo
4
Rí
Ri C
Río a ine
Caine Roi
AAn
5 ngg
ooss
tutu
rara
Sipesipe
NORTH
Approximately 5 Kilometers
Figure 2 ~ The Cochabamba valley (also known as the Central Valley or Valle Central)
and suyu groups made by the Inca Huayna Capac. This map is based on early colonial
documents (Source: Modified from N. Nachtel, ‘The mitmas of Cochambamba Valley:
the colonization policy of Huayna Capac’, in G.A. Collier et al., eds, The Inca and Aztec
states, 1400–1800: anthropology and history (New York; Academic Press, 1982), p. 207)
Central (Central Valley) formed the principal basins for Cochabamba irrigation
(Figure 1 inset). Basin irrigation typically depended on the control of one or a
few water sources. In Cochabamba, this scale of irrigation often came to consist
of a sub-basin of the valley floor, even if irrigation was planned or imagined for
the full basin area.
Suyu irrigation and the web of Inca geography

From their capital city of Cuzco, the armies of the Inca state conquered the
inhabited mountains and coastal lowlands as far north as Pasto in present-day
southern Colombia and to the south in central Chile. The Inca conquests of
this realm were concentrated between about 1440 and 1500. Geopolitical state-
craft of the Inca empire relied on the integration of scores of diverse ethnic
groups and territories. Centred on Cuzco, the Inca state organized its vast
territory into four spatial sub-units known as suyus (sometimes spelled suyos):
(i) Collasuyu to the south and southeast, which included the Cochabamba
valleys that were conquered in the late 1400s by the Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac
(r. 1493–1527); (ii) Cuntisuyu to the southwest; (iii) Chinchaysuyu to the north
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

Jacha
Moco
4
Villa 3
Mercedes
Road to
Cochabamba
2 Santa Cruz
Highway
R
i
Calic
a
n to
Pra
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Canal
M
Can
am
Canal
an
1
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a
NORTH
Gringo
Ca
na
Road to
l
Cochabamba
0 300 600
Meters
Main Irrigation Canals

Main Diversion Barriers Tarata
Irrigation Canal Influence Zones
Road to Cliza
Figure 3 ~ Suyu irrigation areas at the Calicanto irrigation complex near Tarata. Map
based on field notes, historical documents, and aerial photographs.
and northwest; and (iv) Antisuyu to the east. In each of the four territories, or
suyus, the provincial administrators of the Inca empire directed extensive irri-
gation and agricultural terrace works.19 Their massive projects affirm the
modern-day designation of the vast Inca empire as one of the world’s pre-
eminent ‘prehistoric hydraulic states’.20
Inca state policy led to the transformation of the valleys of Cochabamba into
the premier bread-basket of the south-central Andes. The ruler Huayna Cápac
ordered the labour drafts and resettlement colonization that marshalled an esti-
mated 14 000 agricultural workers for the state’s production of irrigated maize.21
Irrigation was crucial for the success of the empire’s maize growing in the
Cochabamba valleys. Annual rainfalls that were probably similar to recent means
of 450–550 mm. (approximately 18–22 in.) could not secure rainfed farming in
the tropical, semi-arid climate of Andean valleys such as Cochabamba.22
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

Moreover, past climates of Cochabamba and the greater central Andes that pre-
vailed during the 1400 and 1500s were probably colder than present, which may
have stimulated agricultural intensification such as field terracing in the
favourable growing areas of low–middle elevations.23 Climate and intensification
pressures may thus have contributed to the incentive for irrigation in prime
farmlands such as the Cochabamba valleys.
The canal-centred area of the suyu served as the chief spatial unit of irrigated
farming in the Cochabamba valleys during the Inca reign.24 In the main Central
Valley of Cochabamba, the largest of the flat-floor grabens produced by fauling
and uplift in the region, the suyus that took shape were long ‘bands’ or ‘stripes’
(Figure 2).25 Major canals brought irrigation to each of the suyu units. An esti-
mated 77 suyus made up the irrigated farming of the Central Valley. In turn this
large number of suyus was grouped into a total of five expansive growing areas
(referred to in colonial documents as chacaras), shown in Figure 2. The Inca
rulers alloted these Cochabamba chacaras and the suyus within them to the chief-
tains, or kurakas, of diverse ethnic groups, to state-operated farmlands, and to
the workers, known as mitimas, who were drafted for state agriculture. In other
Andean valleys, such as Cuzco, the Inca state placed a similar emphasis on coor-
dination of canal-centred irrigation clusters, which state administrators and local
people referred to by such names as ceques.26
Suyus were also the primary spatial unit of Inca farming at the Calicanto irri-
gated area near the village of Tarata in the western corner of the High Valley
(Valle Alto) of Cochabamba, a large graben and presumably once a Pleistocene
lake bed (Figure 1 inset). Canal remains and sedimentary deposits suggest that
the Calicanto suyus were shaped like radial cones (Figure 3).27 Some suyus at
Calicanto were probably constructed, or administered anyway, directly by the
Inca rulers.28 This irrigated maize agriculture would have resembled the state-
led production of the Central Valley, although on a reduced scale. In addition,
the Inca rulers had granted a certain share of the Tarata suyus to the farmers
of diverse ethnic groups. The ethnic groups at Calicanto were referred to as
señorios or ‘nations’ in colonial documents of the sixteenth century. These irri-
gators consisted of various peoples from Mizque in southern Cochabamba and
other Inca subjects belonging to the ethnic groups of the chichas. (The primary
residence of the chichas was located still further to the south.) With the grants
of Calicanto suyus to these ethnic groups, the Inca state sought to ensure their
self-provisioning of staple foodstuffs such as off-season potatoes (mishka papa).
The importance to irrigation of the suyu image as a cultural concept was sug-
gested by the notable extent and significance of the word’s connotations. The
primary gloss of suyu was ‘sector’. The Inca applied this meaning to the chief
territories of the state (e.g., Collasuyu, Cuntisuyu, Chinchasuyu, Antisuyu) as
well as to irrigation units. These primary connotations were supplemented by
other widespread usages. Indeed, the suyu root was contained in more than two
dozen common terms recorded in the early colonial Quechua-Spanish dictio-
naries, especially those of the Jesuit priests Fray Diego González de Holguín and
Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, who both lived for prolonged periods in south-
central Andean cities such as Cuzco and Puno (Figure 1).29 Their dictionaries
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

attested to the cultural power and wide range of suyu as an Inca concept and
cultural image.
Suyu irrigation was not merely the vivid spatial realization of a powerful cul-
tural image; it was also a product of the social processes that shaped human-
induced environcultural changes. At the Calicanto suyus, the work of irrigators
channelled irrigation water and water-borne sediments over a farming area of
roughly 30 km2. Their work with water and sediment guided the deposition of
huge quantities of sand and silt that were transported via stream channels from
the heavily eroding farmlands of the upper Calicanto watershed.30
(Accumulation of irrigation sediments in the Calicanto irrigated area were
0.5–4.5 m. deep by 1991.) Sedimentology of the irrigation-derived deposits at
Calicanto – especially the vertical continuity and the lateral or areal contiguity
– indicated that its waterworks were probably deployed during Inca rule as well
as before. The colonizing Inca rulers probably devised suyu irrigation by adopt-
ing and expanding the use of existing waterworks.
Suyu irrigation hinged on the modification of various environcultural
processes. Water and sediment flows and deposition, soil characteristics includ-
ing moisture availability, and vegetative cover were common human-shaped mod-
ifications of suyu irrigation.31 The task of irrigators at suyu sites such as Calicanto
was to channel intermittent, high-energy, floodwater-type flows from mountain
streams across low gradient slopes and alluvial fans such as the one that formed
below Tarata. Biogeophysical changes were characteristic of irrigated fields, con-
veyance canals, and drainage and discharge habitats. Presumably undertaken by
Inca corvées and other groups of skilled farm labourers, these environcultural
alterations helped to ensure the usefulness of suyu irrigation. Irrigation struc-
tures associated with these environcultural alterations also provided an incen-
tive for continued use of the suyu arrangements.
The Andean valley basins, such as the Central Valley and the High Valley of
Cochabamba, served as the immediate setting for collections of multiple irri-
gated suyus cultivated with maize. This function of the basin demonstrated its
crucial many sided role in Inca land use and politics. The Inca rulers and their
subjects viewed the subtropical mountain basins and valley bottom-lands (well
suited for maize growing) as one of a handful of similarly scaled environments
(along with temperate alpine farmlands, grass-covered pasture and rangelands,
coastal lowlands, and humid forested foothills). Taken collectively, these envi-
ronments were part of a notable state policy and a conspicuous cultural ideal
through which the state and its subjects, including the conquered ethnic groups,
exercised direct access to the varied environments, including mountain basins,
and the resources they contained.32
The image of the valley basin also was used to showcase Inca state power and
its agro-environcultural prowess. Here too, the use of the valley basin was woven
together with other similarly scaled environments into a web of Inca geography.
The Inca state and its subjects, especially the region-scale ethnic groups or seno-
rios, valued the mountain basins as a crucial node within the web of utilized
environments. This web of Inca geography was later termed ‘verticality’ or
‘vertical archipelago’ (in the case of discontinuous territories) by modern-day
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ethnohistorians.33 A revealing account of the role of the Cochabamba basins in
the web of Inca geography was authored by the remarkable auto-ethnohistorian
known as ‘The Inca’, Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616) (born Gómez Suárez
Figueroa to an Inca colonial noblewoman and a Spanish conquistador of Cuzco).
His influential and popular Comentarios reales de los Incas, first published in Spain
in 1609, gave the following account of valley basins under the Inca state: ‘From
all these cold provinces [Collao and the Altiplano] they [the Inca] removed
many Indians at their own expense and settled them to the east . . . regions of
grand fertile valleys . . . which had been uninhabited . . . totally abandoned, empty as
a desert, because the Indians had had neither the knowledge nor the skill to build canals
to irrigate the fields’ (my translation and emphases).34
Garcilaso’s passage on the mountain basins of Cochabamba blended the geo-
graphical ideals of both the Inca state and Spanish colonial rulers.35 First,
Garcilaso’s empireexalting narrative, written in Seville, where he lived his adult
life, credited the irrigated landscapes of the Cochabamba basins entirely to Inca
power and knowledge. The civilizing Inca were said to have filled the previous
emptiness of these places. To the colonial geography of Spaniards in western
South America the Garcilaso-style rooting of geographical ideals and use pat-
terns in ‘grand fertile valleys’ became a familar ideal: the resplendent qualities
of the Andean valley basins beckoned colonists. Overall, Garcilaso’s account of
the Andean basins thus seemed to fuse a mixture of Inca and Spanish geogra-
phies. This fusion of landscape images and geographies presumably reflected
his own experiences and identity since other expressions of the ‘hybrid’ char-
acter of Garcilaso distinguished one of the most distinctly creole perspectives
on early colonial Latin America.36
Basin irrigation and the geography of Spanish colonialism

Valley basins became a central focus of Spanish colonialism in western South
America beginning with military conquest of the Iberian invaders. In the wake
of the military defeat of the Cochabamba region in 1539, the valley settlement
of Tarata in the High Valley was serving already by 1550 as a colonial district
(corregimiento) and food supplier within the sprawling viceroyalty of Peru and its
mountainous subdivision of Alto Peru (literally High Peru, whose approximate
boundaries were Huancavelica and Jujuy: Figure 1). In the Central Valley not
far from Tarata, the colonial Spaniards founded the Villa de Oropesa, later
renamed Cochabamba.37 In the Cochabamba valleys the rights to the control
and use of land and irrigation were at the core of myriad conflicts among colo-
nial Spaniards and Indians. As discussed below, the local suyu irrigation persisted
in the region albeit with major modifications. At the same time, the valley basins
and their uses such as irrigation were imbued with an unprecedented value in
the new Spanish colonial geography.
Valley basins like the High Valley and the Central Valley of Cochabamba
fired the geographical imaginations of the Spanish rulers of the Andean colony
in a remarkably far-reaching fashion. A majority of early colonial town settle-
ments in the Andes were located in valley basins (with notable exceptions such
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as mining centres at Potosí and Oruro and Altiplano locations like La Paz). The
High Valley had its principal settlements at Tarata and Cliza, while the early
colonial towns of Quillacollo and Oropesa/Cochabamba were major settlements
of the Central Valley (Figures 1 and 2). Other major valley towns in High Peru
were founded by the colonial viceroyalty at La Plata or Chuquisaca (now Sucre)
(1538–9) and Tarija (1550). By 1590 the new Peruvian viceroyalty had officially
founded more than 100 valley towns in the Andes mountains between Antioquia
in present-day Colombia and Tucuman in the Andean foothills of northwestern
Argentina. In the colonial geography of the Spanish rulers, these Andean val-
ley towns functioned as centres of military strength and political control.
Many towns in the valley basins took shape through the nucleations of Indians
forced to relocate from the remote uplands and surrounding mountain slopes.
The preferred location in valley basins of these forced resettlements, known in
South America as reducciones, simultaneously made and mirrored the power geog-
raphy of Spanish Andean colonialism.38. . . Reducciones were designed and
enacted by Francisco de Toledo (r. 1569–81), who as viceroy was the head admin-
istrator and chief architect of crown policy in western South America under the
Spanish emperor Phillip II. For Toledo, securing the valley settlements of the
mountainous Peruvian colony was a geopolitical imperative.
In Cochabamba more than 100 pre-Spanish settlements were nucleated by
colonial administrators into an estimated dozen reducción towns, all located in
valley basins. Valley settlements of Cochabamba that were founded by colonial
edict included Capinota, Tiraque, Mizque, Aiquile, Tiquipaya, El Paso, and Sipe
Sipe (Figure 2).39 With these forced resettlements and the consolidation of the
remaining rural population into Indian communities, Spain’s colonial govern-
ment destroyed the once powerful role of the region-scale ethnic groups or seño-
rios. Indeed, the early colonial administrators purposefully dismantled the
region-scale patterns of land use that powerful ethnic groups had co-ordinated
under the Inca policy of verticality or vertical archipelago. Under the geogra-
phy of early Spanish colonialism the Andean valley basins became, in a broad
sense, the geographical successor to the once powerful region–scale webs of the
ethnic groups.
Farmlands around the new valley settlements of the Peruvian viceroyalty fed
the colonial population centres. Irrigated where possible, the valley farmlands
gained a multi-faceted importance. The economic and agro-ecological value of
the valley farmlands was featured in the Spanish crown’s imperial geographical
reports, or relaciones geográficas. The regional reports commissioned by the
Empire contained the responses of magistrates and other local officials to a stan-
dardized imperial survey. Sanctioned by Phillip II (r. 1556–98), the 49-question
survey had been drafted and distributed by imperial cosmographers and states-
men through the Council of the Indies during the 1570s and 1580s.40 Preserved
copies of relaciones geográficas were completed for Cochabamba in 1585 and
1586.41 According to these reports, the region was a pre-eminent supplier of
foodstuffs to Spanish colonial settlements throughout the south-central Andes.
Wheat, and wheat flour in particular, signified a special place for the valley
basins of Cochabamba. Wheat itself was a dietary staple among colonial
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Spaniards, and wheat bread was a sine qua non of their accustomed cuisine, their
staff of life.42 In short wheat fortified colonial rule. To colonial Spaniards and
to crown administrators, the Cochabamba granary evoked the geographical
image of irrigated valley basins.43 Widely read and influential accounts of High
Peru (Alto Peru), the Peruvian viceroyalty, and Spanish colonial geography
touted this image of the Cochabamba basins. In the early 1600s, for example,
Reginaldo Lizárraga and Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa remarked on the fame
of the irrigated ‘valleys of Cochabamba’ as premier wheat producers.
The renown of the irrigated valley basins of Cochabamba as primary wheat
producers stemmed also from the magnitude of inter-regional trade under
Spanish colonialism. Hacienda estates located in the Cochabamba valleys, owned
by Spaniards and located in the vicinity of town settlements, supplied wheat that
was shipped via transport and trade circuits to colonial mining centres and other
population nucleii in places unsuited to wheat growing. Most notable among
these wheat importers was the mining metropolis of Potosí, a city of more than
100 000 inhabitants by 1600. The irrigation basins of Cochabamba also shipped
much wheat to the Altiplano and especially the settlement of Ciudad Nueva,
later renamed La Paz and made into the legislative capital of Bolivia. By treat-
ing the irrigated basins as producing units, the rhetoric of official colonial
reports tended to overlook wheat production and trading by Indians. Their over-
sight belied the extensiveness of Indian production and commerce, including
wheat cultivation and trade, that was an integral part of the colonial economy
in High Peru and throughout much of the Peruvian viceroyalty.44
Irrigation was inevitably given mention in major colonial descriptions of the
geography of the Cochabamba valley basins. Reginaldo Lizárraga, a high-rank-
ing colonial official, predicted that irrigation of the Cochabamba valleys (taken
to be the basin-wide scale) would fuel a severalfold expansion of wheat pro-
duction.45 That amplification, Lizárraga claimed, would be sufficient to provi-
sion wheat flour and unmilled wheat to both the burgeoning populations of
Potosí and the densely settled Altiplano – particularly its new colonial trade
nexus at the city of La Paz. According to Lizárraga’s account, the wheat from
the Cochabamba valleys was the ‘best in the world’. Similarly, the wheat of irri-
gated Cochabamba valleys garnered high praise in other imperial compendiums
on New World colonial geography. For example, high praise for irrigated wheat
growing was featured in a well-known account of Cochabamba entitled ‘The
famous valley . . . and its district’ written by the perspicacious Antonio Vásquez
de Espinosa.46
Colonial geographical descriptions of Andean valley irrigation were also
deeply cultural works. These mid-elevation tropical mountain valleys were dis-
tinguished by a mild climate, a seasonality of precipitation, and growing condi-
tions suited to wheat and a variety of Mediterranean food plants that were staples
of Spanish colonial cuisine.47 Colonial accounts emphasized favourable com-
parisons between these particular food-growing landscapes of the Peruvian
viceroyalty and familiar southern European environs. The valley basin of
Cajamarca, located in the northern sierra of present-day Peru, could be covered
with wheat that ‘grows as well as in Sicily’, according to the pioneering Andean
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chronicle of Pedro de Cieza de León, a soldier–scribe and later chronicler whose
1553 book was widely read at the time in Spain, Europe, and the New World
colonies.48
The image of the irrigated basins of the Andes wove together the imperative
of strategically familiar landscapes and allusions to divine providence. Abundant
instances of the latter, in which irrigated valley basins were seen as signs of
earthly paradise, peppered both the pioneering and most scholarly treatises on
Andean landscapes and geography.49 The irrigated basins were divinely favoured
or beneficent, not to mention well suited and inviting to Spanish colonial use.
In addition to irrigation, the soil fertility and climate were often registered as
most favourable. Indeed, the leading chronicles of colonial landscape and geog-
raphy gave the impression of a valley-specific concentration of marvels that
invited and justified Spanish colonialism in the Andes in a way akin to the rhetor-
ical support of Spanish imperialism throughout their New World colonies.50
Divine wonders of the Andean basins were also naturalized.51 For instance, early
Spanish colonial geographical accounts compared the irrigation of mountain
basins to the natural rainfall runoff from upland slopes, a process also referred
to as regar.
Suyu irrigation of Cochabamba did not disappear in the 1530s; rather the
existing waterworks became reformulated with the onset of Spanish colonialism.
To my knowledge, the suyu irrigation of Cochabamba was unmentioned by the
high-ranking cosmographers, chroniclers, and chief colonial administrators of
the region. A contrast to the conspicuous imperial codification of Cochabamba
irrigation as valley- or basin-scale in scope, the suyu irrigation was reformed with-
out official pronouncement. Suyu irrigation was remade in a manner that fitted
within new colonial institutions in the irrigated valleys. Colonial land use and
property institutions in Cochabamba such the encomienda, the lease to a land
tract replete with tribute-paying Indian residents, and the hacienda, the well-
known manorial estate, were faced with conditions, including ecological ones,
that encouraged the adoption of the suyu.
A growing number of Spaniards laid claim to hacienda estates of valley farm-
land, together with the riparian rights to irrigation, in the Cochabamba valleys.52
Their claims were established through crowngrants, acquisitions, and frequently
the outright theft of Indian resources.53 In some cases the colonial Spaniards
and their workers destroyed the off-takes of Indian canal arrangements in order
to divert irrigation into their own waterworks. In many cases, however, they pre-
ferred the tactic of usurping the intact Indian waterworks. In the High Valley
near Tarata, the canal-based territories of suyus outlined the new boundaries of
Spanish colonial haciendas. These colonial estates included those such as Prado
de San Luís and Mamanaca, formed in the Calicanto irrigated area.54 The largest
hacienda estates, such as Chullpas, which was located midway between Tarata
and Cliza, contained as many as ten suyus within its boundaries.
Use of suyu-based irrigation by colonial haciendas in the Cochabamba
valleys grew from a mix of the selective borrowing and alteration of existing
practices. Colonial haciendas at Tarata and other High Valley sites, which
were estimated to number 24 by 1692, presumably found it advantageous to
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adopt the technical infrastructure of suyu irrigation.55 Suyu off-takes and diver-
sion weirs from the river channels, extensive networks of primary and secondary
canals, drainage devices connecting between fields, and the ubiquitous embank-
ments along field borders (known as ‘bunds’ in irrigation parlance) were key
infrastructural elements. These technical features of irrigation, which had been
created by the human shaping of biogeophysical processes via the labours of
Indian farmers, could be converted to hacienda use. Rights to suyu irrigation
were made to correspond to the legal customs of Spanish water law. In the
Peruvian viceroyalty, that legal tradition was modified to make use of the rota-
tional style of irrigation scheduling that had been a basis of the Inca-sponsored
mit’a.56
The centrality of irrigation suyus and other canal-based spatial units was rein-
forced by the resistance of colonial Indians to Spanish domination. Attempted
protection of water rights became a main form of Indian resistance. Resistance
efforts pivoted on the control of irrigation territory, and sometimes entailed
legal tactics that appeared in judicial documents. Several legal cases were filed
with respect to irrigation disputes in Cochabamba’s valleys, especially its Central
Valley. Following military conquest, the Peruvian viceroyalty had granted the lat-
ter’s farmlands, water resources, and Indian residents as two prize encomienda
leases to high-ranking Spaniards. By 1540, one valley lease, held by the renowned
viceregal lawyer Juan Polo de Ondegardo, was being hotly contested.57 (Juan
Polo de Ondegardo was a leading expert of the Spanish empire on Inca history,
land tenure, and land use.)
In 1556 the leader of a group of colonial Indians known as the Paria filed
suit in Spanish colonial court against Polo de Ondegardo and the Indians liv-
ing on his Cochabamba encomienda.58 The Paria were an ethnic group, which
had earlier been recognized by the Inca and whose principal territory was
located near Oruro (Figure 1). Hernando Asacalla, the leader of the Paria
Indians in 1556, deposed exhaustive information about his group’s rights to land
and water in the Central Valley. Asacalla’s deposition showed in convincing detail
how the Paria people, along with eight other ethnic groups, had been granted
irrigation suyus by the Inca ruler Huayna Cápac. While their primary residence
was located in Paria, located in the Altiplano about 100 km from Cochabamba,
they reported that during the Inca reign their group regularly sent members to
work the irrigated farmlands of Cochabamba on either a seasonal or a year-
round basis.
Legal efforts by Asacalla and the Paria people to regain their lost lands did
not succeed, yet their desperate attempts illustrated how the everyday impor-
tance of suyus and allied land units were reinforced by resource conflicts.
Asacalla and the Paria people staked their water and land claims to suyu units
even decades after conquest. These subjects of the Peruvian viceroyalty, like
other colonial Indians, wished to demonstrate that their previous rights had
been fully established under the Inca, and had then been removed illegally.
Legal claims of encomenderos, hacendados, and other landowners (mostly
Spaniards), for their part, also relied on claims to Inca territories such as the
suyu. The tactics of these colonial landowners aimed to prove that their prop-
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erties were descended directly from holdings of the vanquished Inca state rather
than gained through the usurpation of other Indian holdings.
Reinforcement of suyu territories by judicial disputes could thus stem from
the actions begun either by colonial Indians or by Spaniards. Of course, the two
parties tended to marshal the past traditions of suyu use for their own contrasting
purposes. Deft manipulation of the contradiction was deployed by the well-
informed Polo de Ondegardo in the dispute over his Cochabamba encomienda.
Responding in 1540 to a local judge’s issuance of a set of 14 questions, a so-
called interagatorio, Polo de Ondegardo elabourated how his encomienda had con-
sisted of lands that had belonged to certain Inca chacaras, which were large land
areas each made up of groups of suyus.59 Polo de Ondegardo testified in the
same legal deposition that these irrigated chacaras (and the suyus they contained)
had never been possessed by the Paria Indians or others. Justifying his own land
claim, the legalist swore that these irrigated valley lands had never been used
by a nonlocal ethnic group.
By relying on claims to Inca ownership, the practice of colonial law in west-
ern South America was reinforcing the spatial domain of certain resource insti-
tutions, in particular the suyu. This consequence was surely paradoxical, at least
at first glance, for legal codes in the Spanish colonies were conceived of as major
instruments for the integration of subject territories into the overseas empire.
Spanish rulers counted on such codes in order to establish property rights and
rules for the use of resources. Still, the colonial rulers of Andean South America
were also compelled to incorporate references to Inca property precedents. Such
considerations were both legal theoretic and socio–political.60
The importance of suyus and other canal-based territories continued amid the
cascade of colonial conflicts over irrigation resources. It was noted even by
Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, chief architect of the colonial design of valley-based
geography. During his royal inspection (visita) of Cochabamba in 1574, Toledo
reported how Indians and Spaniards were embroiled in local disputes over irri-
gation at the scale of individual canals.61 Visiting the Mizque valley of southern
Cochabamba, Toledo witnessed a heated dispute over irrigated land. Mizque
Indians had lodged a complaint against a colonist named Diego de Valera.
According to the account contained in Toledo’s visita, the Indians complained
that the colonist had stolen their water rights by diverting a main canal, and
that he was trying to steal their lands by devaluing them. At each attempt of the
Mizque Indians to rebuild the canal system, Diego de Valera was said to order
his oxen teams be be used to destroy the connections of canals to their fields,
thereby altering water flow and sediment transport that was crucial to irrigated
farming.
A similar struggle took place on the outskirts of El Paso (then Santiago del
Paso), a reducción resettlement of Indians in the Low Valley located about 10 km
from the Villa de Oropesa (later to become Cochabamba).62 Indian towns-
people and their crown-appointed legal representative (known as the protector de
los naturales) initiated the suit by addressing a letter of complaint directly to
Phillip II, the Spanish emperor. The defendant in their complaint was Gerónimo
de Ondegardo, heir of the famous legalist. The El Paso people and their
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representative denounced Gerónimo de Ondegardo for having stolen so much
water that the Indians were left ‘drinking it from puddles’ (beberla de charcos).
The lawyer of Gerónimo de Ondegardo, acting in his absence since the defen-
dant resided in La Plata (later Buenos Aires), tried to marshal a defence on
grounds that the disputed irrigation source and the watered farmland were
derived from an Inca suyu rather than from Indian lands.
If such legal disputes preserved the salience of suyus within the colonial sys-
tem, just as important to their survival was their practical usefulness. Suyu irri-
gation utilized by Gerónimo de Ondegardo, for example, was claimed by the
defendant to produce an annual wheat crop of 300 fanegas on his estate (about
3000 kg.).63 His defence also claimed that the disputed water source provided
turning power for three grist mills that ground wheat flour. Wheat and wheat
flour, emblematic foodstuffs of the Spanish overseas empire, thus flowed from
the reinvented use of local irrigation arrangements. The actual commonness of
local, canal-based arrangements continued to contrast the image of basin-scale
or valley-wide irrigation that had been created as a foundation of Spanish colo-
nial geography in the Andes.
Coda: the subsequent rescaling of irrigation to the grassroots

The basin scale acquired further salience as the chief geographical image of
Cochabamba irrigation under the later period of Spanish colonial rule. This
geospatial vision culminated in the plans of late colonial Bourbon rulers. Basin-
scale irrigation at Cochabamba was advocated in the survey of Francisco de
Viedma, a high-ranking Bourbon administrator who directed reforms in the
sprawling Intendencia of Santa Cruz.64 Following Bolivian independence from
the Spanish empire in 1826, a variety of schemes for basin-scale irrigation were
proposed and constructed, to varying degrees, in the Cochabamba valleys.65
Economic liberalism, foreign investment and an ethos of modernization moti-
vated these basin-scale irrigation schemes. Influence of the national and mod-
ern image of irrigation owed much to the conflictive encounters and
geographies of Spanish colonialism, even though the more recent schemes were
also created as postcolonial constructions.
Basin-scale irrigation increasingly became a reality in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. Typically the modern schemes for basin-scale irrigation, which became
common in Cochabamba after the populist 1952 National Revolution, sought to
centralize water authority and enforce a fee agreement. Ideally, the development
of modern irrigation in the region would have occurred in conjunction with
populist agrarian reform. Basin-scale irrigation and allied modern institutions
were exemplified by the National Irrigation System Project No. 1, otherwise
known as La Angostura. Inaugurated in 1950, the La Angostura project created
a large reservoir in the High Valley (known as Laguna de Angostura; Figure 1
inset) in order to irrigate a large part of Cochabamba’s Central Valley. The La
Angostura project was the largest irrigation scheme in Bolivia until the mid-
1990s.66 It epitomized the centralization of basin-scale irrigation projects and
institutions in the prized valley bottoms.
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Most recently, a number of development agencies, including many NGOs, are
offering support to local canal-based suyu irrigation in Cochabamba.67 The
region’s largest example of local canal-based suyu irrigation is the Multiple-Use
Laka Laka Project (Proyecto Multiple de Laka Laka). Led by a ‘grassroots’ NGO
and funded by international aid agencies in support of ‘sustainable develop-
ment’, the claim of the Laka Laka project is that its incorporation of suyus is
ensuring the preservation of tradition. The project also believes that the local
scale of its suyu irrigation traditions will ensure the socioeconomic advantage of
even distribution of benefits among water users and the environcultural bene-
fit of sound resource management. To date, both their claims and their promises
have been hotly contested. The claim to preserve tradition is challenged espe-
cially by a group of former occasional irrigators, known as tail-end users, whose
fields are located at the outer ends of the earlier suyu canals. These tail-end
users were excluded by the spatial planning and boundary fixing of the Laka
Laka Project. Indeed, the struggles for water rights by tail-end irrigators illus-
trates the blatant reinvention, based upon spatial fixing of the local scale, that
is a cornerstone of the local development being undertaken at the Laka Laka
Project.
Similarly, local struggles have arisen over the extra-local distribution of the
benefits and costs of the Laka Laka Project. These social struggles revolve around
both socioeconomic and environcultural features of the project. One conspicu-
ous struggle is being waged by the inhabitants of the neighbouring Calicanto
uplands in the hill country west of Tarata. These upland land users are being
pressed to undertake soil conservation works, perhaps even drastic measures, in
response to the severe erosion that is resulting in sedimentation that threatens
the irrigation works.68 The people whose principal lands are located in the
upland watershed, who already were much poorer than the irrigators, are
angered over the local scaling of the benefits and costs of the Laka Laka Project.
The upland land users are embittered that they were excluded as participants
or beneficiaries of the project and are, at the same time, being asked or even
required to make sacrifices and concessions in order to implement the conser-
vation measures.
Conclusion: images of scale and scales of irrigation

Rulers of the Inca state and the Spanish colonial empire conceived of canal-
based suyus and Andean valley basins, respectively, as chief scalar images of
irrigated farming. The rulers utilized these scales of irrigated farming to situate
the choice irrigated landscapes of such sites as Cochabamba within their own
distinct geographical orders. Irrigation of suyus and valley basins highlighted
the political power of the Inca and Spanish rulers, added to their economic
domination, and made more governable the nonInca ethnic groups and later
colonial Indians. To empire-building Spaniards in the 1500s and 1600s, the
Andean basins served to anchor a new colonial geography of the Andes.
Irrigated agriculture, like forced resettlement, was emblematic of the new
empire’s conspicuous control of the Andean valley basins that were geopolitical
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strongholds in High Peru and other subdivisions of the sprawling Peruvian
viceroyalty.
Notwithstanding the dichotomous images of the local canal-based suyu and
the larger basin unit, the scaling of irrigation took place in processes that were
interlinked. Social co-ordination, conflict, and human environcultural changes
conditioned a more complex and multiple-level scaling of irrigation than could
be seen in the dual pair of images. Inca suyu irrigation was tied to the larger
‘vertical’ web of state geography that featured valley basins as a principal node.
That Inca geography sought to consolidate rule over diverse ethnic groups and
to co-ordinate their local land use. Intermediate-scale co-ordination of irrigation
and other local resource management was central to the Inca state. Colonial
Spanish administrators dismantled those scales of land use that were co-ordi-
nated over region-size areas larger than strictly local communities. As part of
that dismantling of existing social and environcultural processes, the new
European rulers reinvented suyu irrigation as a key feature of local water man-
agement that fitted into their basin-centred domination of the Andean peoples.
Related rescaling and reinvention of local resource use under Spanish colo-
nialism featured mit’a riparian water rights, ayllu rural communities, and manay
sectoral fallow.
Current development efforts in the Andean countries and throughout Latin
America are heavily influenced by the contrasting images of local canal-based
irrigation and basin-wide schemes. The influence of this present-day perception
is deeply rooted in the irrigation geographies of the pre-European and early
colonial periods, although this influence has been overlooked. Rapidly growing
interests in ‘local’, ‘grassroots’, and ‘sustainable development’ can benefit by
paying close attention to the reinvention and occasional rescaling of irrigated
landscapes. Recent and ongoing changes in the use of these water resources
need to be compared to former irrigation practices. Indeed, the increasing role
of ‘tradition’ in a variety of present-day development approaches urges a criti-
cal and reflexive familiarity with the existing and past geographies of irrigation.
Contemporary local-scale irrigation projects, such as the suyu arrangements of
the Laka Laka Project must be seen as having their own roots in colonial and
modern historical geographies.69 Of special importance is how these connec-
tions to the past, as well as the associated historical discontinuities, are shaping
the present-day practices of irrigation.
Irrigation planning would do well to abandon the preconceived dichotomy
of scale between local irrigation and basin irrigation schemes. The idea of a sin-
gle all-defining scale, most recently seen in local irrigation initiatives, is in need
of substantial rethinking. Local irrigation must be recognized as taking shape
in relation to key processes that operate at other scales such as the basin. This
geographical awareness can be readily applied to the monumental contrast
between local suyu irrigation under the Inca state and such recent attempts at
‘grassroots’ suyu irrigation as the Laka Laka Project. The former was integrated
with region-scale political and economic organization and resource manage-
ment. Those articulations stand in sharp contrast to most current projects of
canal-based irrigation that lack scaled-up linkages. In order to move beyond a
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priori notions of scales, the current interest in local irrigation must be sensitive
to scale linkages, rescaling at multiple levels, and the joint socio-environcultural
construction of scale changes. Such awareness will improve the assessment of
small-scale irrigation and should improve its future viability.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the comments and the collaboration of Luís Rojas, Suzy
Portillo, Jorge Santanalla, Guido Gúzman, Susan Paulson, Florencia Mallon,
Steve Stern, Margarita Zamora, William M. Denevan, Yi-Fu Tuan, Thomas Vale,
and Robert Sack. Special thanks to the Ecumene reviewers and to Don Mitchell.
Thanks to the Wisconsin Humanities Research Institute and the Berkeley
Environmental Politics Workshop for their generous comments and insights.
Notes
1
For examples see P. Sijbrandig and P. van der Zaag. ‘Canal maintenance: a key to
restructuring irrigation management’, Irrigation and Drainage Systems 7 (1993), pp.
189–204; D.W. Guillet, Covering ground: Communal water management and the state in the
Peruvian highlands (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992); P. H. Gelles,
‘Channels of power, fields of contention: the politics of irrigation and land recovery
in an Andean peasant community’, in W. P. Mitchell and D. Guillet, eds, The social
organization of water control systems in the Andes (Washington, DC, American
Anthropological Association, 1994), pp. 233–74; G. Knapp, Riego precolonial y tradi-
cional en la sierra norte del Ecuador (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1992); W. E. Doolittle, Canal irri-
gation in prehistoric Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); W.P. Mitchell,
‘Irrigation and community in the Central Peruvian highlands’, American Anthropologist
78 (1976), pp. 35–44; R. C. Hunt and E. Hunt, ‘Canal irrigation and local social orga-
nization’, Current Anthropology 17 (1976), pp. 388–411.
2
For examples see D. Barkin and T. King, Regional economic development: the river basin
approach in Mexico (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970); F. Posada, J.
Antonio, and J. de Posada, The CVC: challenge to underdevelopment and traditionalism.
(Bogotá, Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1966); J. O. Maos, The spatial organization of new
land settlement in Latin America (Boulder, Westview Press, 1984); M. E. Murphy, Irrigation
in the Bajío region of colonial Mexico (Boulder, Westview Press, 1986).
3
Within the broad scope of geographical cultural ecology I refer especially to a criti-
cal political ecology ‘which works from an ecocentric view of the biophysical envi-
ronment but stresses social forces as the major causal factors’. See Buttel and
Sunderlin, cited in J. Friedmann and H. Rangan, eds, In defense of livelihood (West
Hartford, Kumarian Press, 1993), p. 3. This sort of political ecology is elabourated on
in other descriptions. See K. S. Zimmerer, ‘Ecology as cornerstone and chimera in
human geography’, in C. Earle, K. Mathewson, and M. S. Kenzer, eds, Concepts in
human geography (London, Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 161–88, and R. Peet and
M. Watts, eds, Liberation ecology: environment, development, social movements (London,
Routledge, 1996). It also resembles the idea of a political ecology ‘that is rooted in
productions of nature that hold environcultural concerns in tension with social, cul-
tural, and political economic considerations’. See C. Katz, ‘Whose nature, whose cul-
ture? private productions of space and the ‘preservation’ of nature’, in B. Braun and
N. Castree, eds, Remaking reality: nature at the millennium (London, Routledge, 1998),
pp. 46–63.
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

4
The powerful critique and criticisms of modern Western development schemes cen-
tred on irrigated agriculture have been a major impetus for the ‘grassroots,’ ‘local,’
and ‘sustainable development’ approaches. This study’s perspective on these
approaches is informed by such works as Peet and Watts, Liberation ecology; J. Crush,
ed, Power of development (London, Routledge, 1995); S. Corbridge, ‘Third World devel-
opment’, Progress in Human Geography 15 (1991), pp. 311–21; A. Escobar, Encountering
development: the making and unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1995). My study is engaged with specific aspects of these critques in the next
section.
5
See, for example, E. Goldsmith, ‘Learning to live with nature: the lessons of tradi-
tional irrigation’, Ecologist 28 (1998), pp. 162–70.
6
Examples of this perspective include the following: E. Swyngedouw, ‘Neither global
nor local: “glocalization” and the politics of scale’, in K. R. Cox, ed., Spaces of global-
ization: reasserting the power of the local (New York, Guilford Press, 1997), pp. 137–66;
N. Smith, ‘Homeless/global: scaling places’, in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G.
Robertson, and L. Tickner, eds, Mapping the futures: local cultures, global change
(London, Routledge, 1993), pp. 89–119; A. Herod, ‘The production of scale in United
States labour relations’, Area 23 (1991), pp. 82–8; A. Pred and M. J. Watts, Reworking
modernity: capitalisms and symbolic discontent (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press,
1992); D. Harvey, Justice, nature, and the geography of difference (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996).
7
T. J. Bassett and K. S. Zimmerer, ‘Cultural ecology in the 1990s’, in G. Gaile and C.
Wilmott, eds, Geography in America, Benchmark 2000 (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1999); B. L. Turner II, ‘Spirals, bridges, and tunnels: engaging human–environment
perspectives in geography’, Ecumene 4 (1997), pp. 196–217; Zimmerer, ‘Ecology as cor-
nerstone and chimera’; K. S. Zimmerer, ‘Introduction: geographies of landscape
change’, in K. S. Zimmerer and K. R. Young, eds, Nature’s geography: new lessons for
conservation in developing countries (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp.
3–38. See also Peet and Watts, Liberation ecologies; P. Parajuli, ‘Beyond capitalized
nature: ecological ethnicity as an arena of conflict in the regime of globalization’,
Ecumene 5 (1998), pp. 186–217. The grouping together of these approaches under the
label ‘geographical cultural ecology’ is based on their common ground, a defining
interest in the relations of people to the environment. Grouping for this purpose does
not downplay the differences among these approaches within the people–environ-
ment area.
8
R. Fardon, Counterworks: managing the diversity of knowledge (London, Routledge, 1995),
pp. 2–21; O. Harris, ‘Knowing the past: plural identities and the antinomies of loss
in Highland Bolivia’, in Fardon, Counterworks, pp. 105–23.
9
See, for example, E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The invention of tradition
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983).
10
K. S. Zimmerer, Changing fortunes: biodiversity and peasant livelihood in the Peruvian Andes
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996).
11
C. Zerner, ‘Through a green lens: The construction of customary environcultural law
and community in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands’, Law and Society Review 28 (1994),
pp.1079–1122; C. Zerner, ‘Transforming customary law and coastal management prac-
tices in the Maluku Islands, Indonesia, 1870-1992’ in D. Western and R. M. Wright,
eds, Natural connections: perspectives in community-based conservation (Covalo, CA, Island
Press, 1994), pp. 80–112.
12
A similar emphasis is found, for example, in the works of Vandergeest. See P.
Vandergeest, ‘Mapping nature: territorialization of forest rights in Thailand’, Society
and Natural Resources 9 (1996), pp. 159–75.
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

13
These ecological ideas centred around assumptions of spatial and temporal stability,
together with the opposing theoretical directions of current trends in ecology, are an
area of considerable promise for the rethinking of human–environment relations, and
are especially significant for the proliferating environment–development projects that
include conservation and environmentally sound or sustainable resource use. See K.
S. Zimmerer, ‘The reworking of conservation geographies: non-equilibrium land-
scapes and nature–society hybrids’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90
(2000), pp. 251–76.
14
C. Sage, ‘Intensification of commodity relations: agricultural specialization and dif-
ferentiation in the Cochabamba serranía, Bolivia’, Bulletin of Latin American Research
3 (1984), pp. 81–97; M. Lagos, Autonomy and power: the dynamics of class and culture in
rural Bolivia (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); H. Sanabria, The
coca boom and rural social change in Bolivia (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press,
1993).
15
G. Sandoval Z., Las ONG’s y los caminos del desarrollo (La Paz, HISBOL, 1993); K. S.
Zimmerer, ‘Social science intellectuals, sustainable development NGOs, and political
economies of Bolivia’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 21 (2000), 114–29.
16
Examples are discussed and in some cases espoused in F. Apffel-Marglin, ed., The spirit
of regeneration: Andean culture confronting Western notions of development (London, Zed,
1998); Escobar, Encountering development; C. Stadel, ‘The mobilization of human
resources by nongoverncultural organizations in the Bolivian Andes’, Mountain
Research and Development 17 (1997), pp. 213–28; A. Bebbington, ‘Sustaining the Andes:
social capital and policies for rural regeneration in Bolivia’, Mountain Research and
Development 18 (1998), pp. 173–81; K. S. Zimmerer, ‘Rural grassroots development’,
Benchmark 1990, Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers 17/18 (1992), pp. 277–82;
Parajuli, ‘Beyond capitalized nature’.
17
K. S. Zimmerer, ‘The origins of Andean irrigation’, Nature 378 (1995), pp. 481–3.
18
See, for example, K. S. Zimmerer, ‘Agricultura de barbecho sectorizado: lLuchas sobre
la ecología del espacio productivo durante los siglos XVI y XX’, Allpanchis 23 (1991),
pp. 189–226.
19
W. M. Denevan, ‘Technical report: the cultural ecology, archaeology, and history of
terracing and terrace abandonment in the Colca Valley of Southern Peru’ (Madison,
University of Wisconsin, Dept of Geography, 1987); R.A. Donkin, Agricultural terracing
in the aboriginal New World (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1979); M. Moseley,
The Incas and their ancestors: The archaeology of Peru (London, Thames & Hudson, 1993);
J. V. Murra, The economic organization of the Inka state (Greenwich, CO, Jai Press, 1980);
J. Sherbondy, ‘Water and power: The role of irrigation districts in the transition from
Inca to Spanish Cuzco’, in Mitchell and Guillet, The social organization, pp. 69–98; J.
M. Treacy, Las chacras de Coporaque: Andenería y riego en el Valle del Colca (Lima, Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos, 1994); R. T. Zuidema, ‘Inka dynasty and irrigation: another
look at Andean concepts of history’, in J. V. Murra, N. Wachtel, and J. Revel, eds,
Anthropological history of Andean polities (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986),
pp. 177–200.
20
See, for example, K. Wittfogel, Oriental depotism (New Haven, Yale University Press,
1957).
21
N. Wachtel, ‘The mitimas of the Cochabamba Valley: the colonization policy of
Huayna Capac’ in G.A. Collier, R.I. Rosaldo, and J.D. Wirth, eds, The Inca and Aztec
states 1400–1800: anthropology and history (New York, Academic Press, 1982), pp.
199–235. Many of the forced colonists of Cochabamba came from near Cuzco, the
imperial capital. The Inca state used such colonization campaigns for the goals of
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

both concentrating economic production and consolidating political power.
22
I. Montes de Oca, Geografía y recursos naturales de Bolivia (La Paz, Editorial Educacional,
1989).
23
S. O. Brooks, ‘Prehistoric agricultural terraces in the Río Japo Basin, Colca Valley,
Peru’ (Madison, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dept of
Geography, 1998); L.G. Thompson, E. Mosley-Thompson, W. Dansgaard, and P.M.
Brootes, ‘The Little Ice Age as recorded in the stratigraphy of the tropical Quelccaya
Ice Cap’, Science 234 (1986), pp. 361–4.
24
Wachtel, ‘The mitimas’.
25
B. Larson, Colonialism and agrarian transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550–1900
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988); Wachtel, ‘The mitimas’.
26
Guillet, Covering ground’; Sherbondy, ‘Water and power’; L.J. Seligmann and S. G.
Bunker, ‘An Andean irrigation system: ecological visions and social organization’, in
Mitchell and Guillet, The social organization of water control systems in the Andes, pp.
203–32.
27
See also Zimmerer, ‘The origins.’
28
R. Schramm, ‘Mosaicos etnohistóricos del valle de Cliza (valle alto cochabambino),
Siglo XVI’, Historia y Cultura (La Paz) 18 (1990), pp. 3–41.
29
D. González Holguín, Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú llamada lengua
qquichua o del Inca (Lima, Imprenta Santa María, 1952 [1608]); F. D. Santo Tomás,
Lexicon o vocabulario de la lengua general del Perú (Lima, Imprenta Santa María, 1951
[1560]); see also B. Mannheim, The language of the Inka since the European invasion.
(Austin, University of Texas Press, 1991).
30
K. S. Zimmerer, ‘Soil erosion and labour shortages in the Andes with special refer-
ence to Bolivia, 1953-1991: implications for conservation-with-development’, World
Development 21 (1993), pp. 1659–75.
31
Zimmerer, ‘The origins’.
32
E. Mayer, ‘Production zones’, in S. Masuda, I. Shimada, and C. Morris, eds, Andean
ecology and civilization (Tokyo, University of Tokyo Press, 1985), pp. 45–84; Moseley,
The Inca; J. V. Murra, ‘Una apreciación etnológico de la Visita’, in W.E. Soriano, ed.,
Visita hecha a la provincia de Chucuito por Garci Diez de San Miguel en el año 1567 (Lima,
Casa de la Cultura del Perú, 1964); J. V. Murra, ‘El “control vertical” de un máximo
de pisos ecológicos en la economia de las sociedades andinas’, in J. V. Murra, ed.,
Visita de la provincia de León de Huánuco (1562), Iñigo Ortiz de Zuñiga, visitador, II
(Huánuco, Perú, Universidad Hermilio Valdizan, 1972); F.L. Salomon, ‘The dynamic
potential of the complementarity concept’, in Masuda, Andean ecology, pp. 511–31; K.
S. Zimmerer, ‘The overlapping patchworks of mountain agriculture in Peru and
Bolivia: toward a regional-global landscape model’, Human Ecology 27 (1999), pp.
135–65.
33
Murra, ‘El “control vertical” ’; Murra, The economic organization.
34
I. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas (Montevideo, Ministerio de
Instrucción Pública y Social, Colleción de Autores de la Literatura Universal, Vol. 4,
1963 [1609]).
35
D.A. Brading, The first America: the Spanish monarchy, creole patriots, and the Liberal state
1492-1867 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991); M. Zamora, Language,
authority, and indigenous history in the ‘Comentarios reales de los Incas’ (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
36
Brading, The first America; Zamora, Language.
37
Larson, Colonialism.
38
D.W. Gade and M. Escobar. ‘Village settlement and the colonial legacy in Southern
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

Peru’, Geographical Review 72 (1982), pp. 430–49; D.J. Robinson, ed., Social fabric and
spatial structure in colonial Latin America (Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, 1979); D.J.
Robinson, ed., Migration in colonial Latin America (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
39
40
M. Jiménez de la Espada, ‘Antecedentes’, in M. Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Relaciones
geográficas de indias: Perú (Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 183, 1965.
[1881–97]), pp. 5–117; F. de Solano, Cuestionarios para la formación de las relaciones
geográficas de Indias: Siglos XVI-XIX (Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, 1988); C.R. Edwards, ‘Mapping by questionnaire: an early Spanish attempt
to determine New World geographical positions’, Imago Mundi 23 (1969), pp. 17–28.
41
A. Alvarez, ‘Relación de la ciudad de La Plata’, in Jiménez de la Espada, Relaciones
geográficas de indias: Perú, pp. 352–6; D. Cabeza de Vaca, in ibid., pp. 342–51.
42
D.W. Gade, ‘Landscape, system, and identity in the postConquest Andes’, Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 82 (1993), pp. 460–77.
43
R. de Lizárraga, Descripción breve de toda la tierra del Perú, Tucumán, Río de la Plata
y Chile (Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1968 [1603–1609]); A. Vázquez
de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las Indias occidentales (Washington, DC,
Smithsonian Institution, 1948 [1628–1629]).
44
O. Harris, B. Larson, and E. Tandeter, eds, La participación indígena en los mercados
surandinos: estrategias y reproducción social siglos xvi a xx. (Cochabamba, CERES, 1987);
45
Lizárraga, Descripción.
46
Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendio.
47
Gade, ‘Landscape’.
48
P. de Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú: primera parte (Lima, Pontificia Universidad
Católica del Perú, 1984 [1553]).
49
J. de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico
City, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2nd edn, 1962 [1590]); Cieza de León, Crónica.
50
S. Greenblatt, Marvelous possessions: the wonder of the New World (Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1991).
51
On the idea of geoteleology, see Y. Tuan, the hydrologic cycle and the wisdom of God: a
theme in geoteleology (Unversity of Toronto, Dept of Geography, 1980).
52
The early colonial records of Cochabamba irrigation give the impression that water
rights were commonly regarded as appurtenant to land, although in other colonial
regions of Latin America the rights to water were transferred separately. See Murphy,
Irrigation in the Bajío.
53
Larson, Colonialism; ‘Visita de Mizque por Virrey Don Francisco de Toledo, 27 julio
1573’, trans. Suzy Portilla Espada (Cochabamba, Archivo Histórico de la
Municipalidad de Cochabamba, 1573); ‘Juicio sobre el agua de riego del Río de Patata
entre los Indios del Paso y Gerónimo de Ondegardo’ (Cochabamba, Archivo Histórico
de la Municipalidad de Cochabamba, 1604).
54
G.W. Sánchez Canedo, ‘Hacienda, campesinado, y estructura agraria en el Valle Alto,
1860-1910’ (thesis, Cochabamba, Universidad Mayor de San Simon, 1992).
55
Larson, Colonialism, p. 183.
56
Guillet, Covering ground, p. 92; Sherbondy, ‘Water and power’.
57
58
‘Juicio’.
59
60
Brading, The first America.
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

61
‘Visita’.
62
‘Juicio’.
63
ibid.
64
F. de Viedma, Descripción geográfica y estadística de la Provincia de Santa Cruz de la Sierra
(Cochabamba, Los Amigos del Libro, 1969 [1793]).
65
It is notable too that modified suyu irrigation served as a crucial support for the for-
mation and viability of smallholder farming (minifundia) in parts of the Cochabamba
valleys during the 1700s and 1800s, persisting in places into the twentieth century.
Social and political economic aspects – but not cultural ecological ones – are dis-
cussed in the existing evaluations of this minifundia formation. See Larson,
Colonialism; R. H. Jackson, Regional markets and agrarian transformation in Bolivia:
Cochabamba, 1539–1960 (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
66
I. Montes de Oca, Sistemas de riego y agricultura en Bolivia: taller de análisis del riego (La
Paz, MACA, 1992).
67
H. Gandarillas, A. L. Salazar, V. L. Sánchez, B. Sánchez, E. L. Carlos, and P. de Zutter.
Dios da el agua: Qúe hacen los proyectos? (La Paz, HISBOL, 1994).
68
Zimmerer, ‘Soil erosion’.
69
On the need for alternative or populist policies for development – what is referred
to above as ‘local’, ‘grassroots’, and ‘sustainable’ – to be understood in terms of their
own modern roots see M. Watts, ‘Nature as artifice and artifact’ in Braun and Castree,
Remaking reality, pp. 243–68.
Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

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Rescaling Irrigation in Latin

Article in Ecumene · April 2000

Available from: Karl S. Zimmerer

G eographical images of distinct scales support the widespread utilization and

Ecumene 2000 7 (2) 0967-4608(00)EU187OA © 2000 Arnold

Ecumene 2000 7 (2)

Geographical scale and political ecology

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Irrigation and the Cochabamba region: suyu and basin definitions

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Suyu irrigation and the web of Inca geography

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Main Irrigation Canals

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Basin irrigation and the geography of Spanish colonialism

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Coda: the subsequent rescaling of irrigation to the grassroots

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Conclusion: images of scale and scales of irrigation

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