In a 2023 image by Mexican photographer Eunice Adorno, a man stands in front of a towering wall, searching for the horizon line where the concrete ends and the sky begins. It’s as though he were contemplating an ancient structure, trying to interpret its meaning.
In Mexico, as elsewhere in the world, the construction of major infrastructure like dams went hand in hand with government visions of economic development. In keeping with the redistributive aims of the Mexican Revolution, these dreams had a utopian tint: everyone was supposed to share in their promise. My father-in-law, a government civil engineer, once remarked during a late-night dinner, “En México nos hacen falta unas trece presas chingonas” (In Mexico, we still need another 13 kick-ass dams).
Adorno’s image provides a sobering update to that 20th-century optimism. The concrete panels in its frame belong to Hermosillo, Sonora’s Abelardo L. Rodríguez Dam, which is currently at 0 percent capacity. The photograph is part of a series titled Las aguas eran salvajes (The waters were wild), which captures the flip side of Mexico’s development promises: the yearning for the ways of life that were lost to a failed vision of modernity.
Born and raised in Morelos, Eunice Adorno holds a diploma in photography from the Morelos Center for the Arts in Cuernavaca. She has worked both as a photojournalist and a fine art photographer, and her work has been exhibited in Madrid, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and other cities.
In her long-term projects, Adorno’s work combines a photojournalist’s eye for moments in time and slices of society that represent larger forces with fine art photography’s depth of composition. Her 2012 photo book Las mujeres flores (Flower women) catalogs her experience living alongside women in two of Mexico’s Mennonite colonies, towns established in the 1920s whose residents have preserved their dress, language, and other customs. She captures intimate, peaceful moments that challenge outsiders’ perceptions of the community as restrictive and conservative.
After embedding in the Mennonite communities, Adorno chronicled another type of community: the Casa Estudantil Octubre Rojo, or Red October Student Housing, a former psychiatric hospital in Sinaloa, that university students took over in the 1980s in protest of a shortage of student housing. They occupied it until 2017, when it was demolished. In 2012, Adorno began photographing the building’s remaining squatters. The result was published as a small-run book in 2020 with spiral binding resembling a school notebook. Culture journalist Max Pearl describes it as “beautifully unsettling,” writing that the photography captures the squat’s ambivalent atmosphere as simultaneously a “remnant of utopian struggle” and doomed to failure.
If Mujeres flores represents the persistence of a community outside the norm, Casa Estudantil Octubre Rojo represents the deterioration of one. Las aguas eran salvajes, meanwhile, chronicles the ways of life disappeared in order to make way for a new norm. The series is an archaeological investigation into the experiences of dispossession and destruction caused by 20th-century water infrastructure.
Adorno began the series in Mexico City, where there is a close relationship between colonization and water infrastructure. The Mexica people who occupied Tenochtitlán—Mexico City’s name at the time of its conquest by the Spanish—engineered an intricate system of dikes, canals, and other structures to simultaneously live atop a saline lake and maintain a supply of fresh water. In their siege of the city, Spanish conquistadores deliberately destroyed much of that system. “The genocide took place in the waters,” said Adorno in an interview.
Las aguas eran salvajes focuses not on that moment of destruction but on more modern histories. Its depicts infrastructure from the Porfiriato—the period of governance of six-term president Porfirio Díaz around the turn of the 20th century—and the era of the PRI, or the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico uninterrupted from 1929 until 2000. During the Porfiriato, “there was a notion, imported from abroad, of using industrial development to get ahead,” explained Adorno. “The PRI continued having that relationship to Mexico’s territory as one of conquest.”
After Mexico City, Adorno traveled to dams in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. Then she looked north to Sonora. She traveled to the Plutarco Elías Calles hydroelectric dam, also known as El Novillo. The construction of that dam inundated three towns: Suaqui, Batuc, and Tepupa.
One of the photographs shows what appears to be a former church, a structure falling apart brick by brick, but whose arches and buttresses are still visible. It stands in a field of green grass in the foreground of a mountain range, as though it were a natural part of the ridgeline. Both the structure and the former lakebed have become visible as drought, climate change, and overuse have caused the reservoir’s waters to recede.
Stripped of the community that once gave it meaning, the church appears vacant and hollow. The destruction of the towns left “an enormous void in the minds of their inhabitants,” said Adorno. (Diego Rodríguez Landeros’s essay “Telling the Stories of Sonora’s Water,” published in The Border Chronicle in April 2025, also describes the flooding of these towns.) Many residents were displaced to the state capital of Hermosillo, where they used electricity produced by the dam that had upturned their lives.
Adorno also photographed the empty Abelardo L. Rodríguez Dam in Hermosillo. There, the concrete structure that used to confine wild water so confidently is becoming rubble and waste. Instead of heralding the future, it is a symbol of environmental collapse, a failed vision of modernity that deepened inequality instead.
While in the past, the church fell victim to the dam, now, in their colors and shapes, the photographs don’t look so different from one another. They share a sense of abandonment. Both are traces of a larger arc of dispossession.
Today, as in the era of the infrastructure Adorno has photographed, Mexico is facing a moment in which its industrial capacity is expanding. The combined forces of nearshoring, the energy transition, and tourism have made Sonora the focus of renewed economic-development efforts.
One of the plans currently on the table is the construction of three new dams in Sonora. As The Border Chronicle previously reported, the proposal has been met with significant opposition, especially from ejidatarios, or communal-land ranchers. At the end of July, hundreds of people participated in a caravan between the affected towns of Ures and Puerta del Sol, including farmers whose tractors were affixed with signs reading “No to the Dams, Yes to a Free Río Sonora.”
Instead of accepting promises of economic development, locals are rejecting them. They have already seen enough “monuments to an idea of progress that never arrived,” as Adorno put it.
Where new dams once inspired awe, they now spark more complex emotions. In Adorno’s photo of the man dwarfed by the facade of the Abelardo L. Rodríguez Dam, his back is turned to us, leaving it to the viewer to decide what he must be thinking. I can only imagine that his expression is one of longing. The loss of free-flowing rivers to climate change and extraction has brought with it the disintegration of old visions of what the future might hold, ushering in a new era of uncertainty.
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