When we reached the Sunland Rio Grande site, artist Sandra Paola López Ramírez asked everybody to greet the river. It was a cold, windy morning, and rain spit down from a large, dark cloud that hung over El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The river offering was the first event of World Water Week 24, an event inspired by the United Nations’ World Water Day (every March 22), which raises awareness about the 2.2 billion people on the planet who lack access to water. As I walked to the riverbank on the spongy, muddy ground, I could see the U.S.-Mexico border in the distance (a quarter mile to the south)—and its wall that follows the contours of the hilly and mountainous land. A Blackhawk helicopter, presumably from the Border Patrol, flew back and forth over the border. As I knelt in front of the Rio Grande, I looked at the greenish-brown rushing water, rippling with the continual fierce gusts of wind. When I first interviewed Paola in December, she told me that water is alive and ancient, and that it carries memory. She told me that when she crosses the border to Ciudad Juárez, she always walks over the bridge instead of driving, because she wants to see the river, the wall, the razor wire. “I feel the pain of the river,” she told me. “I feel the loss. It has moved me to do the work.”
I was there because I am working on a book about water, battles over water, the border, and climate change. Right now, while the national coverage of the border is so often relayed via partisan narratives spawned by U.S. presidential election campaigns, large, looming issues like water burble below the surface. In fact, along the U.S.-Mexico border you could say that the water wars have already begun. In 2020 the Mexican military commandeered central Chihuahua’s most important dams in order to deliver an allotment of water to the United States, as stipulated in a 1944 treaty. In September 2020, after one of the worst droughts ever to hit Chihuahua, the Mexican state opened the water valves of a commandeered dam known as La Boquilla. In response, a mass movement of farmers forced the military out and shut down the valves. It was a full day of battle that seemed straight out of a 1990s dystopian science fiction novel: it began with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters from the Mexican military, and ended with live ammunition and arrests.
According to the 1944 treaty, Mexico must deliver 1.7 million acre-feet of water every five years to the United States. The next delivery is for 2025, and the tension is already thick. On May 4, Senator John Cornyn and several federal congresspeople, including Monica De La Cruz and Henry Cuellar, sent a strongly worded letter to U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken insisting that the U.S. “engage with Mexico to ensure Mexico fulfills its obligation to release owed water to the U.S. every year,” even though the treaty states every five years, not every year. De La Cruz followed this up by introducing legislation in February that “mandates the Secretary of State to leverage the full spectrum of U.S. diplomatic tools, including voice, vote, diplomatic capital, and resources, to enforce Mexico’s compliance with the existing treaty.” In February, a Texas sugar plant closed down on the U.S. side, claiming water scarcity and demanding that Mexico “release the water that is owed to us by the treaty.” This was all happening during a situation of prolonged drought and projected hotter weather for El Paso/Juárez (and much of the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico), according to a presentation by UTEP hydrologist Alex Mayer at the World Water Week conference.
At the riverbank, when Paola asked us each to think of an intention for the river as part of the offering, I thought of the title of the conference: Bridging Borders and Leveraging Water for Peace. I thought about discussions I’ve heard around the word “peace” over the years, how the word is not passive but proactive and coupled with vision. I wasn’t clear what that word meant in this context until later in the week when environmental historian C. J. Alvarez (at the University of Texas, but originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico) gave the keynote talk of the conference titled “The River Below: Water and the Search for Peace.” He shared with us his reflection on peace:
“I’ve spent a lot of thinking and writing about the Rio Grande over the past several years. Maybe some of you in the room will think this is too simplistic, too romantic, but I find solace in imagining the river as it once was, great and wild. Self-fulfilled and free, and somehow still existing in a latent state beneath all the concrete, poison, and destruction that we have layered upon it as a species.”
While Alvarez identified areas where we can look for peace on the river—including flood and diplomatic relief—he emphasized the search for the river’s “greatness and wildness.”
Kneeling by and greeting the river, I felt that greatness and wildness, if just for a moment. We were at the Rio Grande right before it turned into the international border, right before river straightening (which happened in the 1930s) took out 124 bends of the river for 67 miles to make it comply with the international boundary as if in a strait jacket. What happened, after I said hello and offered my intention of peace, was something that had happened several times since I had been visiting rivers as part of my research. The sky was still dark and still spitting down cold drops of rain from time to time. In the distance the Border Patrol helicopter almost looked clumsy going back and forth over the international boundary. Paola gently beat a drum as everyone offered their intentions to the river. As I stood by the river with the intention of peace and opened my arms to the sky (to make the heart soft, Paola said), a feeling of deep tenderness swept over me. This feeling of tenderness had happened before: on the Rio Grande in Presidio and Big Bend, and the Rio Conchos in central Chihuahua. It came with a feeling of connection to something much bigger than myself.
A couple of days later, C. J. Alvarez would say that,
“the most inducive kind of peace is not the kind that is achieved by the domination of the river, nor is it a diplomatic resolution or efforts to save the planet, rather the kind of peace that seems to me unattainable in our lifetimes, but that is nevertheless worth identifying, striving for, is kind of peace that is a return to self-willing nature. The more durable, fixed, seemingly permanent the U.S.-Mexico border has become, the more elusive the idea of peace has become also.”
But perhaps the idea of peace was also there, in the river’s running water or in the cross-border conversations and coordination that took place at the conference on both sides of the border at the University of Texas El Paso and the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. Perhaps peace was in this summoning of artists, dancers, hydrologists, and engineers and putting a wide variety of people with a wide variety of perspectives (regardless of nationality) in conversation with each other and, as we were doing that morning with Paola, with the river.
During his presentation, Alvarez read the last three sentences of his book Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S. Mexico Divide out loud, precisely because it ended with the word “peace.” I ruminated on this several day later when I returned to the site of the river offering and took a long, slow walk along its bank on a much sunnier day. Perhaps Alvarez’s words held the vision for peace I was searching for:
“An understanding of the history of construction on the border line allows us to imagine counter representations of the border as a whole that do not cast it either as a wasteland or as a pathological zone. The attention to detail that so possessed the border builders need not be directed exclusively toward the invasion of deserts, the interruption of water sheds, and coercive force. It can also, I hope, be channeled toward ecological stewardship, deeper cultural understanding, and peace.”
Read more: Read More