To Defend Our Water is an environmental history that is especially attentive to the social and political relations that surround the use of water in colonial indigenous communities and private estates in the central highlands of Mexico. Its content is summarized in the author’s simple enunciatory statement: “[t]his book is about water and power” (p. ix). This carefully constructed monograph is solidly based on archival evidence of both legal and extralegal struggles over access to water for agriculture, pastoralism, and domestic use in the communities, haciendas, and towns of Puebla. The theoretical framework for Lipsett-Rivera’s analysis derives from principles of centralization/decentralization of authority to regulate access to and consumption of water, as expressed in the predictive model concerning changes in the relationships among the environment, population, and governance. Her central argument is that during the eighteenth century population recovery and growth occurred simultaneously with declining water supplies because of deforestation,...

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