Watershed

Chapter 7 analyzes how Coatlinchan’s residents experience the prehistoric stone’s removal as both cause and effect of drought and environmental disruptions like climate change. Their understanding frames the stone and other objects claimed as state patrimony as central to telluric processes that guarantee rainfall and access to water and, therefore, life on Earth and in the specific place they inhabit. Through their own collecting practices, town residents are responding to state theft and working to restore a damaged ecology. In this way, they challenge legal regimes and state practices that justified the stone’s extraction from Coatlinchan and reframe it as a site of connection, care, and renewal.