Leahey, 1

Andrew Leahey

Anthropology 106

Ethnography

A Precious Liquid

The ethnography I have chosen to study for this course is that of the

residents of La Purificacion, a community in the Valley of Mexico, located 20 miles

from the center of Mexico City. It is a semiarid climate, with limited rainfall, situated

in a mountainous region of Mexico. Due to their physical environment, the residents

of this valley have a long history of dealing with water scarcity, and their attitudes

towards it have done a large part to shape their culture.

The ethnographic work I have used as a primary source for this essay is

Michael C. Ennis-McMillan’s A Precious Liquid: Drinking Water and Culture in the

Valley of Mexico. In it, Ennis-McMillan states that he chose the location to base his

research by a “combination of chance, opportunity, and interest” (Ennis-McMillan,

3). He never intended to study drinking water in Mexico, he says, but upon doing

ethnographic research of the region’s fiestas, he realized that it was perhaps the

most influential aspect of the people of the valley’s daily life.

La Purificacion’s residents are proud of their valley. “A large metal arch over

the community’s main road greets passersby with the message ‘Welcome to the

Paradise of La Purificacion’ … vehicles have bumper stickers that read ‘I [love] the

Paradise of La Purificacion’” (Ennis-McMillan, 1). The people are largely happy with

their water quality and availability now, which is perhaps best-explained by their

bleak history of water shortage and disease epidemics. In addition, their very

existence relies on the water supply.

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Their pattern of subsistence, their economy, and their lives in general,

completely revolve around the availability of water and their specific methods of

purifying it. They exist, still today, as a largely agricultural and horticultural society.

Individuals that do not own large swaths of land, may own a small green house for

horticultural personal use.

The people of the valley have a rich cultural tradition of rituals and

celebrations. Being a predominantly Catholic region, most of their rituals and

customs revolve around the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. For instance,

Ennis-McMillan touches on the traditions of Corpus Christi, one of the first

celebrations he encountered in La Purificacion. Corpus Christi marks one of the two

large fiestas held each year here, held in the middle of summer. The celebration,

held in honor of the Eucharist of the Catholic Church, takes months of planning.

During Corpus Christi, the community is invited to “participate in Catholic

masses, processions, meals, dances, fireworks and other celebratory activities that

take place over several days at a time” (Ennis-McMillan, 7). Each resident has their

turn being the mayordomo (male) or mayordoma (female), these being religious

positions, held for a year, and put in charge of organizing the fiestas and caring for

the church. These positions carry with them heavy responsibilities as well as

monetary and time burdens. Ennis-McMillan, surprised at the number of people who

voluntarily gave their time and money to the care of the church, commented as

such to one of the residents. He responded that, if someone was to refuse the

position and its responsibilities, they would be ostracized by the community. Among

the punishments would be a banning from the use of the church for weddings or

funerals, and surely more importantly, a cutting off from the water supply.
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The fact that it is used for penalty purposes illustrates how pervasive the

drinking water is to the culture of the residents of La Purificacion. Drinking water is

a necessity of life, regardless of region, however, the culture of the valley is a

noteworthy one because of the fact that all matters of life revolve around its

availability. La Purificacion is a community constantly on the edge of a water crisis.

The author, Ennis-McMillan, cites not a lack of interest from the international

community but a lack of anthropological understanding of the region, and others

like it, for a large portion of the water crisis the world is facing.

To understand the regions current cultural traditions, one must first

understand the heritage of the people of La Purificacion. La Purificacion is situated

in an area known as northern Acolhuacan, named from a fifteenth-century ruling

body, known as the Alcolhua State. Situated to the west, the region is bordered by

Lake Texcoco, to the east, the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Prior to contact with the

Spanish explorers, the majority of the population in the area lived in small

communities. These communities relied chiefly on foraging and simple agriculture

for survival. Agriculture was a difficult subsistence method for the early inhabitants,

as the area surrounding La Purificacion , as a semiarid climate, has limited rainfall.

Structurally complex irrigation systems needed to be constructed to channel water

from the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains.

The Alcolhua State kept control of this region by controlling the water supply.

Controlling the water from the Sierra Nevada mountains gave the leaders great

power, as not only did the residents require water for individual consumption, but as

they began to rely more and more on their agriculture, they required massive

quantities of water for irrigation purposes. Intricate canal systems and irrigation

channels brought water down from the mountains to the areas where the land was
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more fertile for farming and raising crops. The labor required to maintain such a

massive network of channels and canals was enormous. The work was the

responsibility of the local people; with this responsibility came those who would

choose to avoid it. A method of motivating the people to continue to help the

Alcolhua State expand its rapidly-growing agricultural state had to be devised, and

the scarcity of resource with which to punish or reward was already in place.

The responsibility was put upon the people of the valley to not only maintain

their own channels, but to assist in the creation of new channels for surrounding

communities. The punishment for not taking part in such projects was a cutting off

of your water supply for both agricultural and household use. A lack of water supply

for a community was an almost cetain death-sentence for its residents. In this way,

you can see how the idea of using water access as a method of punishment and

reward was already established with the native people, many generations prior to

the arrival of the Spanish and the Catholic Church.

By the time the Spanish arrived in the area, the method of social control by

water control was a well-established political tradition. The Spanish only further

cemented water as a precious liquid. Upon their arrival and subsequent conquest,

they channeled water away from the traditional agricultural sites, as well as the

native households, to irrigate the “colonist’s agriculture land and provide power for

the mills for processing wheat and wool” (Ennis-McMillan, 35). In addition to this,

the Spanish brought with them a new set of diseases, which hit the areas with the

highest populations the hardest. These areas, tended to be centered around the

existing agricultural lands, and the most fertile portions of the region. This upsetting

of the existing order by a water scarcity and disease, forced the native people from
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their traditional living and agricultural areas, and in to less-desirable regions, such

as the area where La Purificacion is now situated.

La Purificacion, sitting on a rocky foot-hill, is geographically a difficult area for

water access. The native people traditionally believe that they are descendents of

indigenous people fleeing a plague-infested area known as La Asuncion. The foot-hill

region of La Purificacion relies on pre-Hispanic canals for its water supply. In addition

to this, it relies on “using this water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and other basic

necessities” (Ennis-McMillan, 35). For an outside observer, the idea of using the

same water for both bathing purposes and drinking, as well as irrigating crops,

seems to be an obviously unsanitary notion. However, the people of the valley have

adapted culturally to their historic predicament of constantly being on the threshold

of an all-out water crisis. The traditioanlly limited access, and limited supply, has

parallels to the issues facing the residents of La Purificacion today.

The residents of La Purificacion, having a limited supply of water, and a

limited knowledge of purification methods, turn to a number of cultural traditions.

They use their water supply as a method of controlling their communities. Do what

is right by the community, and you continue to receive access to what water is

available; run afoul, and you’re cut off. This all made it very simple for the Spanish

to usher in their acculturation of the region. They simply gained control of the water

supply, and tied Roman Catholic belief systems and patron saints with the purity

and availability of water.

The impact of this was the creation of a very devoutly religious and

traditional culture, built around the drinking water. The Spanish simply took what

cultural beliefs were already there, and repurposed them to meet their own

requirements for control. The base cultural traditions were in place, the Spanish
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needed only to mold them. Their past, in some ways very well illustrates what their

future holds.

The future of the people of La Purificacion is shared by the people of many

similar communities, existing in areas where there is a constant struggle for clean

drinking water. They will continue to exist on the edge of crisis, until such time

where the international community takes enough interest in the situation to look in

to the anthropological record, to understand the ethnography of the area, and to

study the culture surrounding the traditions of water scarcity. There is no technology

that can be installed in to regions such as La Purificacion, that can be expected to

cause any real positive net gain. The only way to help the residents is through

education, and the empowerment to advance that comes with it.

Works Cited

Ennis-McMillan, Michael C. A Precious Liquid: Drinking Water and Culture in the

Valley of Mexico. Belmont, California: Thompson Wadsworth, 2006.