To defend our water with the blood of our veins

"What happened when native peoples and Spanish landowners in eighteenth-century Mexico competed for increasingly scarce water? In an unusual book that studies the interplay between the environment and colonial social institutions, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera examines the exercise of power by elites in colonial Puebla and how it brought ruin on Indian communities by denying them access to the water they needed to survive."--BOOK JACKET.