CHAPTER 1

"LISTEN FOR WHEN YOU GET THERE"

Topologies of Invisibility on the Colorado River

We are here. We eat, we dance, we fish.Here we are and we still live.No éramos, somos. (It's not that we were, we are.)

—DON MADELENO

DON MADELENO OFTEN REPEATED the refrain "We're still here." Thefirst time I heard him say this, I interpreted it as a triumphant declarationof survival. In this instance, Don Madeleno was narrating the history ofthe Cucapá people in the delta: a history of war, conquest, disease, waterscarcity, the criminalization of fishing, and the rise of the narco-economy.After everything his people had experienced, they were still there carryingon with their lives.

I heard Don Madeleno use the phrase in this sense on many otheroccasions: in interviews, at festivals, and in informal conversations. Becauseit was part of his personal narration I was struck when I first heardhim use the phrase in a much more literal sense in the context of maps.Every so often I would bring Don Madeleno a map of the delta frombooks or archives to elicit his reactions to these representations of the landhe knew so well. Every time I brought him a map we went through thesame routine: he would look over the page slowly and meticulously andstart pointing to all of the places it was missing. He would comment onwhether or not the map showed the Cucapá village, the fishing grounds,and the Sierra Cucapá. He would also bring up the places that were almostalways missing—Las Pintas, Pozo de Coyote, and a dozen other sites importantto Cucapá history. Then Don Madeleno would irritatedly declare,while pointing at the absent places, "Estamos aquí" (We are here). Onceor twice he went on to emphasize his point by saying, "Somos aquí" (Weare this place).

In this context, "We are here" took on a meaning that is central to theissues I explore in this chapter. What Don Madeleno meant was that whileyou would not know it from looking at any official map of the area, theColorado delta is a terrain rich with the traces of his people's presence:their places, stories, and history. And by saying "Nosotros somos aquí" heinvoked an even stronger connection to place, drawing on the distinctionin Spanish between the two verbs for "to be": ser and estar. Whereas estar isused to describe the current state of something and is almost always usedto describe a location in space, ser is used to describe the unchangeablenature of something. By emphasizing "somos aquí," Don Madeleno wasarguing that his people were not just occupying the delta but that theywere the delta and that their very being was inseparable from that space.

This statement is not just a strategic invocation; it is also indicative ofDon Madeleno's personal experience of the changing landscape. He wasborn on February 16, 1934, one year before the construction of the BoulderDam (later renamed the "Hoover"), the first of the large dams on the river.His life has spanned exactly the time frame in which the Colorado Riverhas been siphoned off from the lower part of the delta where his village islocated. Since the first dam went in, about eighty dams and diversionshave been built on the rivers of the Colorado watershed (Reisner 1993: 40).In the process, the flow of the Colorado to the delta and the Gulf wascompletely cut of.

In this chapter I analyze how maps, literature, and media coverage colludein a representation of the Colorado River that erases the Colorado deltaand its inhabitants in northern Mexico. Therefore, this chapter providesthe historical background and upstream context for why the river nolonger reaches the sea. I argue that the rhetoric around the construction ofthese dams, and in particular the central concept of "beneficial use,"promoted a particular water logic that carries through to present-daypolitics. Whereas in later chapters I examine how people experience thematerial efects of this water logic, in this chapter I examine how theyexperience the political and ideological erasure that results from it. Indoing so, I trace a landscape that has been made invisible in representationsof the river. This is a landscape filled with the places people navigateon a daily basis—their homes, the river, el monte (the bush), el zanjón (thefishing grounds)—as well as the places at a greater distance but still intimatelyconnected to everyday routes in and out of the village: CerroPrieto, nearby colonias, and el Valle de Guadalupe.

The narrative will also visit, if only in stories, places that no longer exist:colonias wiped out by floods; fishing grounds long evaporated as a result ofthe dams upstream; the Colorado River itself, now whisked off" in canalsalong the border. And we visit the places that feature in legends andcreation myths: where Coyote first shared water with the people, themountain of the eagle where the spirits go after death, the mountain rangethat a giant carved into the shape of houses and windows. I conclude byanalyzing a mapmaking project that attempts to redraw the map of theColorado delta and the Cucapa territory.

The Mirage on the Map: The Makings of a River without a Delta

The idea that space is made meaningful is familiar to anthropology, whichhas long recognized that the experience of space is socially constructed.Several authors have pointed out that a key concern in the politics of placemaking is the question of who has the power to make spaces and what is atstake in the process (Braun 2002; Gordillo 2004; Gupta and Fergusoni992). This is a particularly important consideration in the context ofenvironmental disputes, which construct places in specific ways. Constructionsof place that focus on nature, regardless of...