Argentina’s central west encompasses a vast dryland territory, organized on the basis of a great contradiction: the confrontation between oasis and rainfed area (desert lands with no irrigation). Within a territory under arid conditions with different desertification levels, Mendoza is a paradigmatic case. The development model fostered at the end of the 19th century was based on the supremacy of strategic resources: water and soil. A mode of regional development reliant on irrigated lands was since then supported to consolidate the wine export model.

Nowadays, Mendoza’s non-irrigated lands and their people are marginal, not merely by the effect of a restrictive environment but also by the combined action of a fragile environment and the weightier social, political and economic forces that have banished them to the system’s margins. Analysis of the region’s history informs that non-irrigated spaces provided both strategic natural resources for development of irrigated areas and labor for starting productive activities. Simultaneously, non-irrigated lands were curtailed in their right of access to strategic resources for their social reproduction: water, land and identity.