Underground Connections in a Landscape Multiple: The Infiltration Galleries of the Community of Peñas, Bolivia

Abstract

At the start of the 21st century, growing insecurity and conflict around water marks community life in the Bolivian highlands. In the community of Peñas, located in the original peasant indigenous territory of Jach’a Marka Tapacari Cóndor Apacheta, the threat of a mining project that could affect the community’s water sources was answered by the adoption of a “zero mining” resolution. The decision in defence of water is literally supported by an infrastructure: a system of 50 infiltration galleries. It is an extensive network of underground galleries and surface irrigation canals. Considered "ancestral" by the community, the system continues to facilitate the distribution of water across the landscape to this day. In a context of climate change, this infrastructure has acquired an increasingly important role in the memory, organization and defence of the community and its intimate relations with the landscape.

Following a community process of description and revaluation of the practices around the galleries, we trace the articulation of a landscape multiple –a landscape in which many landscapes fit- and the partial connections between these landscapes. We conceptualize these practices as the implementation of a way of “infrastructuring” a landscape multiple. Attending to the filtering function of the galleries, we argue that the galleries of Peñas constitute a consciously "incomplete" process of infrastructuring, and we observe the frictions that this generates with initiatives guided by other forms of infrastructuring the Andean subsoil.