The Connective and Disconnective Capacities of Water Infrastructure: The Making of Chile’s Largest Off-grid Solar Power Irrigation System

Abstract

Based on nearly one year of ethnographic research on an inland island in Southern Chile, this article examines the construction of Chile's largest off-grid solar power irrigation system on Isla Huapi. For decades, the island's indigenous population has put pressure on the Chilean government to provide basic services of electricity and sanitised drinking water. Instead, in 2012, they were provided with a governmental development project that promised an infrastructural system aimed at transporting water from the surrounding lake to their plots for irrigation. Nevertheless, as the construction process progressed over the next few years, islanders found the irrigation system to be a desirable infrastructural connection as it provided them with water in different forms -irrigation water as well as indoor tap water. In this article, I look at the way in which these forms of water became a site of aspiration as well as a site of political struggle between islanders and state actors (government employed engineers). Analysing water and water infrastructure as political and material forms, I argue that struggles over access to water and the forms that waters take, create different connections (and disconnections) not only between water and islanders but also between islanders and the state.