Whiteness and/as Water Infrastructure along the Colorado River

• In Event: All-Too-Human Borders / More-Than-Human Planet (HYBRID)

Abstract

With the US–Mexico borderlands running out of water, many are blaming the politicians who passed imprudent laws and the bureaucrats who built destructive dams. But by following such figures to smoke-filled rooms, academics and activists have overlooked the media that popularized water (mis)management. Engaging everything from the promotional print culture of the Southern Pacific Railway to the “Prize Odes” performed at International Irrigation Congresses, this talk reveals the rise of environmental obliviousness, which is my term for the experiential repertoires that naturalized the constant consumption of earth, water, plants, animals, and ultimately other people. At various times and in various places, environmental obliviousness has supported various social processes, but in the turn-of-the-century borderlands, it played an especially essential role in relational racialization. As US politicians institutionalized new ideas of Asianness (e.g., in the Chinese Exclusion Act), Blackness (e.g., in the Reconstruction Amendments), Indigeneity (e.g., in the Dawes Act), and Latinidad (e.g., in In Re Ricardo Rodríguez), they struggled to define whiteness, which each year seemed less stably Anglo-Saxon and more menacingly German, Italian, Irish, and so on. In this context, the Colorado River’s muddy flow became a perfect medium for white supremacy: by moving racialized peoples on and off irrigated places, those who in other contexts might have been considered Irish Americans or Italian Americans were able to become Anglo Americans. Ultimately, the US’s all-too-human borders shaped and were shaped by the more-than-human planet: whether in cities like Los Angeles or agribusiness areas like the Imperial Valley, what Matthew Frye Jacobson has termed the “alchemy of race” involved the secret ingredient of water.

Author

• Carlos Alonso Nugent, Columbia University