Taming the water to rule. Socio-political conceptions of nature and society in the context of the consolidation of the Mendoza provincial state towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Abstract

In Mendoza, the consolidation of the State was at the end of the nineteenth century, after decimating the indigenous populations from southern. After that the State could extending its sovereignty over these territories. This involved the construction of regional identity and ethnic markers associated with access to key resources such as water and land. In this article, we investigate the hegemonic provincial projects about distribution of water and space from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its implications for a given social and territorial formation. Sarmiento and “water tamers” were writers, engineers, politicians and officials who thought and action in favour of a modern social institution based on a series of theoretical prescriptions involving a strong control and reorganization of nature, designed to consolidate an agro-economic model of specialization. Far from promoting the achievement of the ideals of modernity, this model implied a social structure associated with a system of capitalist nature, where the water resource was one of the articulators that determined the place of every social group in the model of accumulation that consolidated.