Drought and disputes, deluge and dearth: climatic variability and human response in colonial Oaxaca, Mexico

• Published in: Journal of historical geography 2004-04, Vol.30 (2), p.249-276
• Main Authors: Endfield, Georgina H., Tejedo, Isabel Fernández, O'Hara, Sarah L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Climate change; Colonialism; Drought
• ISSN: 0305-7488; 1095-8614
• DOI: 10.1016/S0305-7488(03)00023-9

‘Extreme’ weather events such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, frosts and unusually high or low temperatures can have immense and immediate social, economic and environmental impacts. Investigations of historical extreme weather events, and the nature of the social responses to them, afford insight into the way in which societies have been affected by and have adapted to these events in the past. Historical documents represent invaluable sources to investigate these themes. In this paper we use a range of archival sources to investigate how society in colonial Oaxaca, southern Mexico, was affected by and responded to different types of extreme weather event. Our findings indicate that while drought contributed to antagonism over water supplies between users, it was also used opportunistically to support or challenge cases of water deprivation in legal proceedings. Flooding appears to have been a relatively frequent phenomenon in colonial Oaxaca, but a number of particularly devastating flood events are recorded in the archives. The impact of these events appears to have been determined as much by the timing of the events and level of socio-economic preparedness, as by scale of the flood itself. We then analyse harvest losses due to a range of different climatic phenomena. We highlight how different cross-sections of the community and the local administration responded to these events and suggest that some of the documented harvest losses might have actually been encouraged by high risk agricultural practices.