Eric Boime
Eric Boime is an Associate Professor of American History, with emphases Borderland History and the Environment. He has published a series of articles on the Colorado River Delta, as well as on the American Progressive Era Conservation Movement.
San Diego State University
Session
Since the late twentieth century, popular conceptions of the Colorado River Delta have focused on the river’s “death” in Mexican sands. The delta has been reduced to allegory: a Christ-like landscape, ever-dying for the sins of western civilization. This popular conception not only projects a fallacious and dated “wilderness ideal,” it also obscured two transcendent realities. First, the exploitation of the delta has been fundamental to the entire river’s allocation across the entire (seven-state, two-nation) basin, arguably making the delta one of the most powerful borderland on the continent. A handful of landowners (and agencies that hold their rights in trust) now command continent-spanning control over the most important resource of the American Southwest. Secondly, and relatedly, that unsustainable allocation has illuminated the larger failure of both Mexican and American governments to maintain priority control over their vital freshwater resources.
The “irrigated borderlands” and the decentralization of water policy which attended them, pioneered free-market principles, which found strong purchased in the in the unregulated margins of Mexico and the United States. It is no coincidence that the delta was ground zero for transnational factories decades before the conclusion of NAFTA. It is also no coincidence that neoliberal environmentalism has defined efforts to help “resurrect” the river. The success and failures for these efforts notwithstanding, they have illustrated how federal power has been diluted and hamstrung by binational water agreements championing export-led growth. Efforts to “resurrect” the delta must be understood within the context of this devolution of federal power..