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Abstract
Current scholarship on poverty in the U.S. borderlands argues that limited low-income housing and unenforced land development regulations cause poor domestic water access in south Texas's predominantly Mexican-American rural and periurban low-income communities (colonias). In this article, I argue that water politics, not only poverty or failed public policy, determined the trajectory of inadequate water access. Drawing from legislative archives, legal documents, and court records, I examine two companion legal cases (Jimenez v. Hidalgo WCID 2 et al. [1971] and Fonseca v. Hidalgo WCID 2 et al. [1971]) that challenged the ability of farmer-controlled water control and improvement districts (WCIDs) to dominate regional water governance by excluding colonias from district territory. This territorial exclusion denied colonias residents the right to vote for WCID board candidates and, thus, denied residents the political standing to change the district's operation from irrigation to domestic water supply. Drawing on current scholarship in critical legal geography, the article details how emerging legal discourses rescripted narratives about colonias residents’ access to water through debates over the political territoriality of the WCIDs. Moreover, the legal process shifted the terms of debate from voting rights to historical precedent, the market, policy failure, and prospective water rights. The final legal ruling against colonias residents foreclosed any standing they had in regional water governance and shunted them into their current position of passive consumers of dysfunctional public services with limited ability to change their relationship to regional water management institutions.
El estudio académico sobre la propiedad dentro de los confines de los EE.UU. sostiene que la vivienda limitada de bajos ingresos y la falta de aplicación de las regulaciones sobre desarrollo de la tierra determinan un precario acceso doméstico al agua en las comunidades (colonias) predominantemente méxico-americanas de bajos ingresos que habitan en las áreas rurales y periurbanas del sur de Texas. En este artículo arguyo que las políticas del agua, no solo la pobreza o fallidas políticas públicas, determinaron la trayectoria del acceso inadecuado al agua. Con base en archivos legislativos, documentos legales y registros de las cortes, examino dos casos legales emparejados (Jimenez v. Hidalgo WCID 2 et al. [1971] y Fonseca v. Hidalgo WCID 2 et al. [1971]), que desafiaron la capacidad de acción de un control basado en los propios agricultores y de los distritos de mejoramiento (WCIDs) para dominar la gobernanza regional del agua, excluyendo las colonias del territorio distrital. Esta exclusión territorial le negaba a los residentes de las colonias el derecho a votar por candidatos a la dirección del WCID y de esa manera le negaba a los residentes la capacidad política de cambiar la operación del distrito de agua de irrigación a agua para consumo doméstico. Con base en el actual conocimiento de la geografía crítica sobre asuntos legales, el artículo detalla cómo los nacientes discursos legales reescribieron las narrativas acerca del acceso al agua por los residentes de las colonias por medio de debates sobre la territorialidad política de los WCIDs. Aun más, el proceso legal cambió los términos del debate de los derechos de votación al precedente histórico, el mercado, el fracaso de las políticas públicas y los eventuales derechos sobre el agua. La regulación legal final contra los residentes de las colonias canceló cualquier capacidad que ellos pudieran tener en gobernanza regional del agua y los reubicó en la actual posición pasiva de consumidores de servicios públicos disfuncionales, con limitada capacidad para cambiar sus relaciones con las instituciones regionales de administración del agua.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank The Melburn G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University for supporting archival research that was the empirical basis of this article. I also extend my gratitude to Kathleen O’Reilly and Elliot Tretter for their astute and helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. In addition, I want to thank J. Christopher Brown and the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas for inviting me to present this work in their Nature and Society Lecture Series. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
Notes
1. Jimenez and Fonseca are companion cases and were litigated together.
2. A stipulation of fact is an agreement between parties that certain facts are true or uncontested.
3. Court files confirmed that the litigants did not agree that all of the colonias residents excluded from the WCID could afford to pay the charges of the water supply company (MALDEF 1973k, 13–14).
4. The WCID responded with a brief only after filing a motion to reject the MALDEF amicus curiae brief.