Multiple water and peasant identities from a hydraulic infrastructure: case of the Chingaza system, Colombia

Abstract

Since the construction of the Chingaza system, a hydraulic infrastructure for the provision of water to the city of Bogotá, and the declaration of the NNP Chingaza, the life of the peasants who inhabited the high mountain massif changed radically, as well as their daily material experience of the mountain. Its construction, additionally, entailed the incorporation of new actors and with them other waters in the hydrosocial territory from the encounter between a particular technology (the social) and the mountain (the natural). Based on notions of the political ecology of water, it is intended to show how particular waters were produced and a close relationship with the new peasant identities. It is argued that as a result of the amalgams of which the water in the Chingaza massif is part, it is or became different things (Barnes & Alatout, 2012) and gave way to new imaginaries and, in this route, to new identification processes of its inhabitants.