Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia
by Sarah T. Hines
Water for All chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, which is known for acute water scarcity and explosive water protests. Sarah T. Hines examines conflict and compromises over water from the 1870s to the 2010s, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Analyzing a wide variety of sources, from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, Hines investigates how water dispossession in the late nineteenth century and reclaimed water access in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prompted, shaped, and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements. The struggle for democratic control over water culminated in the successful 2000 Water War, a decisive turning point for Bolivian politics. This story offers lessons for contemporary resource management and grassroots movements about how humans can build equitable, democratic, and sustainable resource systems in the Andes, Latin America, and beyond.
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by Sarah T. Hines
Water for All chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, which is known for acute water scarcity and explosive water protests. Sarah T. Hines examines conflict and compromises over water from the 1870s to the 2010s, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Analyzing a wide variety of sources, from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, Hines investigates how water dispossession in the late nineteenth century and reclaimed water access in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prompted, shaped, and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements. The struggle for democratic control over water culminated in the successful 2000 Water War, a decisive turning point for Bolivian politics. This story offers lessons for contemporary resource management and grassroots movements about how humans can build equitable, democratic, and sustainable resource systems in the Andes, Latin America, and beyond.
Click Here to Purchase
Reviews
"More than land, Cochabamba's water––its glacial mountain lakes, river water, and aquifers––has been the most precious and conflict-riven resource since Inca times. Half a millennium later, the epic struggle exploded in the famous Water War of 1999-2000, marking the collapse of Bolivia's neoliberal regime and its scheme to deliver water-for-profit to a foreign corporation. Yet, as Sarah Hines's magnificent history reveals, the fight for the right to water was the wellspring of popular mobilizations, revolutionary state policy, and escalating urban/rural tensions across the entire 20th century. In the end, Hines's narrative takes a surprisingly hopeful turn. She shows how rural communities, urban barrios, labor and women's associations began to exert everyday forms of control over fair access to scarce water. Beautifully written, deeply researched, and more timely than ever (as the Andes' glacial melt accelerates), this book promises to be an instant landmark of social and environmental history."––Brooke Larson, author of Trials of National Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910.
"Long before the 'Cochabamba Water War of 2000,' periodic conflicts erupted over hydrological resources in this Bolivian city. Water for All reveals the long and sometimes surprising history of how competition for water structured its social, political, and economic life. This book will become required reading for those interested in the past and potential future of resource competition in rapidly urbanizing landscapes in the developing world."––Christopher Boyer, Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Northern Arizona University
"Water for All is a fascinating history that ought to be read by anyone interested in Latin American politics and history. Sarah Hines's masterfully written book explores the Water War in Cochabamba (2000) and considers the deep legacy of the 1952 revolution in recent Bolivian politics in that event."––Jose M. Gordillo, Assistant Professor of History, University of Calgary.
"Sarah Hines's regional historical approach gives us an entirely new and far deeper understanding of the Water War in Cochabamba, a cause célèbre in the international movement against neoliberal globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century." ––Sinclair Thomson, co-editor of The Bolivia Reader: History, Culture, Politics.
"Based on extensive primary research, Water for All deftly blurs the analytical boundaries between rural and urban histories on one hand and environmental and technological histories on the other hand, showing how modernity comes from the bottom up as well as the top down."—Mikael D. Wolfe, author of Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico.
"Water for All shows that the human struggle for life-giving resources does not inevitably lead to violence and domination. As climate disruption intensifies competition for water, Cochabamba's story reminds us that humans are also capable of building equitable and sustainable water systems."—Kevin Young, author of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia.
Sarah T. Hines, an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, studies and teaches Latin American and Caribbean history with an emphasis on environment, infrastructure, race and ethnicity, and social movements. Her research has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Inter-American Foundation, the UC Berkeley Institute for International Studies, the Barnard College Alumnae Association, the University of Oklahoma’s College of Arts and Sciences, and the University of Oklahoma Research Council.
Water for All evolved out of her 2015 dissertation, “Dividing the Waters: How Power, Property and Protest Transformed the Waterscape of Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1879–2000,” which won the UC Berkeley History Department Dissertation Prize and the New England Council of Latin American Studies Dissertation Prize.
A related article, “The Power and Ethics of Vernacular Modernism: The Misicuni Dam Project in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1944–2017,” appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review in May 2018.
She is now working on two new projects. The first, tentatively titled “The Art of Resistance: Dictatorship and Dissent in Cold War Bolivia,” is a social, political, and cultural history of oppositional politics in Bolivia under dictatorship (1964–1982). It explores the visions and projects for social transformation and democratic restoration of a wide array of artists, intellectuals, and activists who constrained and ultimately overthrew Bolivia’s dictatorships. These groups included tin miners, miners’ wives and children, peasants, indigenous communities, leftist political parties and organizations, guerrilla groups, Catholic priests and parishioners, factory workers, high school and university students and faculty, writers, artists like musicians and filmmakers, and exiles. Not only did these groups resist dictatorship, they also built radical and revolutionary projects and created new ways of living and relating to one another in spite of and through their resistance to authoritarian rule.
She is also beginning a new project on the environmental history of glaciers in the Andes. This research will explore the impacts of warming and glacial retreat on Andean society since the end of the Little Ice Age in the nineteenth century as well as people’s changing perceptions of, responses to, and interactions with glaciers in rural and urban communities that depend on glaciers for irrigation and drinking water, hydropower, and tourism.
Before graduate school, Dr. Hines taught social studies at Taft High School in the Bronx, NY (2002–2004) and conducted research in Bolivia with as a Fulbright scholar (2006–2007). She lived in Bolivia from 2010 to 2015 while conducting research and writing her dissertation. Before joining the faculty at OU, she taught at Smith College (2015–2017) and the University of Maine at Machias (2017–2018).
Resources for Instructors
1. I would suggest pairing my book (or chapter five, chapter six, or both) with the short film Abuela Grillo. It's easily found online. Here are links to it that provide some information about the filmmakers and the story it is based on:
https://chaikadai.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/abuela-grillo-grandmother-cricket/
https://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=7046
2. To write a broader lecture on the 1952 Bolivian revolution, in connection to my third chapter, see Carmen Soliz's Fields of Revolution (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Herbert Klein's A Concise History of Bolivia, and/or James Dunkerley's Rebellion in the Veins.
3. To write a broader lecture on Bolivia in the 1990s and early 2000s, in connection to my fifth and sixth chapters, see Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing's Impasse in Bolivia (Zed Books, 2006).
4. To add material on the period of Evo Morales's presidency, see Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing's Evo's Bolivia (University of Texas Press, 2014), Nancy Postero's The Indigenous State (University of California Press, 2017), and/or Mark Goodale's Revolution in Fragments (Duke University Press, 2019).
