Mexico is currently facing severe problems with water availability, wastage and contamination. The most contaminated and over-exploited water resources are concentrated in the most populated areas of the country, where water is scarcer and its quality makes it unsuitable for a variety of uses, including human consumption. At the same time it is indisputable that water quality is a determining factor in public health and ecosystems. The significant growth in population and industry results in a high demand for water, along with contaminating discharges, few of which are treated – and the impact upon the ecosystems is evident. This book addresses all these topics in a single volume, taking into account the challenges presented by the economic, institutional and environmental considerations in Mexico’s water policy framework.

This book focuses in the current situation of water resources, water supply and sanitation, and population movement in Latin America. It identifies new phenomena and challenges that will put more pressure on water resources in the near future and that will create important socioeconomic constraints in population and their governments. This volume offers an evaluation of water resources availability and consumption, water supply and sanitation shortages, management models and population growth and territory occupation trends in eighteen Latin American countries. Also a set of recommendations, policy proposals and projects is outlined.

The impact of recent shifts in global geopolitics and economic markets has led to the re-conceptualization of national borders. Scholars have shifted their analysis away from the narrow idea of «borders», and moved their attention towards the wider view of «borderlands», «border regions», and «border zones», thus, leading to the conceptual re-definition of border politics. These recent approaches have identified border areas as socially constructed territories that demonstrate many of the characteristics of independent polities. Border communities seem to have come to life, creating a degree of autonomy and separation from central state actors. While the rich literature in border studies identifies important changes in local political and economic systems, it does not necessarily identify the mechanisms that create these changes: Why has integration occurred in some border regions while others are being reinforced? Why has integration failed in some cases where opportunity structures are positive, while it has succeeded in others saddled with more limited constraints? The essays in this volume address such fundamental questions.

In Watering the Revolution Mikael D. Wolfe transforms our understanding of Mexican agrarian reform through an environmental and technological history of water management in the emblematic Laguna region. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico and the United States, Wolfe shows how during the long Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) engineers’ distribution of water paradoxically undermined land distribution. In so doing, he highlights the intrinsic tension engineers faced between the urgent need for water conservation and the imperative for development during the contentious modernization of the Laguna's existing flood irrigation method into one regulated by high dams, concrete-lined canals, and motorized groundwater pumps. This tension generally resolved in favor of development, which unintentionally diminished and contaminated the water supply while deepening existing rural social inequalities by dividing people into water haves and have-nots, regardless of their access to land. By uncovering the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were ecologically unsustainable, Wolfe tells a cautionary tale of the long-term consequences of short-sighted development policies.