Water’s guardians: cosmopolitics and water conservation in Northern Morelos, Mexico

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain the paradoxical character of a conservationist movement in Northern Morelos, Mexico, which emerges a few decades ago through the appropriation of spring’s water by Hueyapan’s inhabitants. We will show that, on the one hand, far from being the result of an organized movement about conservation of water located near of Popocatepetl’s volcano, what really impulse such ecologist actions is just a kind of economical rationality, which logic not only has transformed the agrarian regime of Hueyapan, but also has been summed to the defense of the territory addressed by the Permanent Assembly of Morelos Communities, particularly, against the construction of a gas pipeline and a thermoelectric dam. On the other hand, we argue that the economical rationality underlying the choice of the people of Hueyapan to appropriate of spring’s water, more than opposes to a reified notion of cultural value, it rests in a cosmopolitics hidden in an ontological equivocal about water’s guardians.