This chapter addresses the history of chinampas, agriculture, and the rise of rural estates known as haciendas. It examines the construction, cultivation, and distribution of chinampas as well as the dispersed pattern of landholdings and the complexities of land tenure. The chapter observes the conspicuous absence of Spaniards and other non-Native peoples as the owners of chinampas. The chinampas became a source of contestation within the indigenous community, though, since claims of the communal, usufruct rights to chinampas rubbed up against efforts by the nobility to shore up their holdings through private ownership. In the sixteenth century, demographic decline and the competing demands of the colonial government, anxious about provisioning Mexico City during periods of food insecurity, forced a restructuring of land tenure classifications. At the same time, Spaniards received grants to establish ranches away in the nearby hills where they and Nahuas introduced livestock. As a consequence of all this, a distinctive historical geography came into being, with chinampas and intensive, small-scale horticulture in the lakes, and extensive pastoralism in the upland areas.

The sixth chapter examines how Native communities and haciendas adopted livestock rearing and, in particular, cattle ranching as a new economic activity within the lakes. Responding to the rise of the urban market for meat as well as the demographic decline within Native communities, residents of the chinampa districts expanded into the waters of the lakes in new and destabilizing ways. Alongside the chinampas, many of which survived and retained their value, haciendas and Native communities now fashioned pastures from the swamps. As they pushed further into the lake, pastoralists instituted new environmental management practices and constructed new hydraulic engineering works of their own. At the same time, the colonial administration, responding to renewed fears of flooding in the capital, increasingly intervened in the southern lakes’ hydrology. These new forces for change, when combined with higher rates of rainfall because of renewed climate extremes, undermined both the ecological autonomy and the flood defenses of the Nahua communities, portending of wholesale environmental transformation if not ruination on the eve of Mexico’s Independence.

The 1947 upheavals on haciendas outside La Paz were facilitated by a coalition between indigenous peasants and urban anarchists. Three factors were essential to this alliance. First, the urban anarchists’ own politics – their libertarian socialist vision, their attentiveness to both “ethnic” and “class” demands, and their organizational federalism – proved conducive to coalition building. Second, prior rural mobilization had created local leaders and networks that would form the rural bases for the coalition; those rural actors would also help to redefine the urban anarchist left, conferring it with a more antiracist and autonomist emphasis. Third, a series of coalition brokers bridged traditional divides of language, ethnicity, and geography. This account qualifies common dismissals of the Bolivian left as mestizo-dominated and class-reductionist while also illuminating the process through which the alliance developed. It concludes that ideologies and human decisions are often just as important as structural circumstances in determining the potential for popular coalitions and militant mobilization.