Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta

by Shaylih Muehlmann

Living in the northwest of Mexico, the Cucapá people have relied on fishing as a means of subsistence for generations, but in the last several decades, that practice has been curtailed by water scarcity and government restrictions. The Colorado River once met the Gulf of California near the village where Shaylih Muehlmann conducted ethnographic research, but now, as a result of a treaty, 90 percent of the water from the Colorado is diverted before it reaches Mexico. The remaining water is increasingly directed to the manufacturing industry in Tijuana and Mexicali. Since 1993, the Mexican government has denied the Cucapá people fishing rights on environmental grounds. While the Cucapá have continued to fish in the Gulf of California, federal inspectors and the Mexican military are pressuring them to stop. The government maintains that the Cucapá are not sufficiently "indigenous" to warrant preferred fishing rights. Like many indigenous people in Mexico, most Cucapá people no longer speak their indigenous language; they are highly integrated into nonindigenous social networks. Where the River Ends is a moving look at how the Cucapá people have experienced and responded to the diversion of the Colorado River and the Mexican state's attempts to regulate the environmental crisis that followed.

Genres: Anthropology

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Shaylih Muehlmann was born in the most densely populated region of Canada - southwestern Ontario. She comes from a family of songwriters, dogs, philosophers, teachers and poets. She “grew up” between stretches of life spent in Canada, rural Maine and the desert north of Mexico. Her first book "Where the River Ends" is about life at the end of the Colorado River, where the river no longer reaches the sea. Her second book "When I Wear My Alligator Boots" is about narco-culture in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and the devastating affects of the “war on drugs.”

Shaylih holds a Canada Research Chair in Language, Culture and the Environment at the University of British Columbia and has won various awards for her work as an anthropologist including the 2009 University of California Press Public anthropology publishing Prize, the 2012 Ton Vallen Award and the 2012 Junior Scholar Award from the Anthropology and Environment Society.

Reviews

[Daniel Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim, and I don't regret it!

This is a great book - and it's a really interesting and thorough book about "contested indigeneity".

What this means is that the book focuses on the Cucapá - one of the 62 recognized indigenous groups in Mexico. The Cucapá traditionally live at where the Colorado River is supposed to meet the Sea of Cortez - but where it hasn't for a long time due to 90% of the water being diverted into the US and most of the remaining 10% being diverted by Mexico into factories and other industrial uses.

One of the major challenges that the Cucapá face is that this indigeneity is called into question in what is almost a Catch-22. They are discriminated against and demonstrably harassed more than Hispanic fisherfolk in the region, denied permits, etc., and at the same time they struggle to assert protections as an indigenous people because their indigeneity is often called into question.

For instance, when pressing their claim that they should be granted more fishing permits - or at least be granted parity to Hispanic Mexicans in the area - the federal government and NGOs will often question this:

1) Are they really fishing in a traditional area?
2) Are the fish that the catch - corvina - really traditional?
3) Are they using fish for subsistence or selling it?
4) Can they speak the Cucapá language?

Much of the book focuses on the contrast between imagined constructs of indigeneity upheld by the powers-that-be, and how this is used to systematically exclude Cucapá Mexicans from access to the water.

What I appreciate is that the author does not try to present a monolithic voice and doesn't even take the Cucapá oral accounts as Gospel truth. The author instead compares various oral reports and historic documents to construct a social history and explain the meaning of stories.

For instance, today many Cucapá insist that they are more feminist than Hispanic Mexicans and that this is one of their distinguishing cultural features. However, this is contrasted by several points - older Cucapá women who insist that they were the first to go out fishing on their own without men, and the corresponding communities in the US that recount that the Cucapá in Mexico are famous for having much more powerful female figures. The author's synthesis is that this is probably a more recent development. By excluding many Cucapá from the Colorado River and thereby hobbling their traditional trade, the Mexican government's policies inadvertently weakened the economic monopoly of men vis-a-vis women, which created opportunities for women to take on greater roles outside the home and assert themselves in their families and the public sphere.

The book has 5 chapters - an overview on how the River is used and understood by the US and Mexican governments, Cucapá and mapping, Cuacapá and work (fishing vs factories vs drugs vs odd jobs), Cucapá and language (language loss, preservation of swear words and greetings, how these phrases are used to distinguish from outsiders), and Cucapá and gender.

I think this is a great book about modern constructs of indigeneity, especially in a community which - like most indigenous people - shares many cultural and lifestyle features with the surrounding population yet still faces discrimination.

[Lili · Rating 5 out of 5]

After I read Cadillac Desert I became really interested on how the decisions about the Colorado River dams may have negatively affected people downstream in the delta. This book thoroughly answered so many questions about the complexities of ingenious identity in Mexico due to water scarcity and colonial entities. I dream some day of the dams falling, water rushing free to the sea, and a thriving Cucapá fishing community.

[Olivia Beeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great ethnography that is well organized, considerate, and interesting to read.