Abstract
This article analyzes how a coalition between working-class residents and activist academics pushed for water justice in the urban periphery of Mexico City over the course of a 10-year period. It shows how the coproduction of a water basin as a territory unsettled traditional administrative categories and empowered local residents to both better understand the place they live and to advocate for themselves. Although unequal, the alliance functioned precisely because of the complementary skills each group brought to the table.
INTRODUCTION
The notion of water justice is not only limited to equitable access but refers also to the participation and recognition of users as legitimate actors in water management. 1 Beyond distributional issues, the notion of water justice embodies a critique of the vertical public decision making, which remains the norm in most countries. This is the case in Mexico, where state institutions are incapable of meeting the challenges posed by rapid urban expansion. As a consequence, in urban peripheries, conflicts over water erupt regularly and the legally required participatory mechanisms are consistently ignored.
This article focuses on the alliance formed in 2010 during the formulation of a water resource plan in working-class neighborhoods located in southeast Mexico City whose inhabitants suffer water injustices from two perspectives. First, they endure serious environmental problems: water contamination, regular flooding, water shortages, and soil fractures. Second, they are excluded from the decision making oriented toward solving these problems.
This article analyzes how, over the course of the next 10 years, the coalition that local residents and activist academics formed pushed for a more inclusive technological and institutional model than the one in place. The mobilization of these two groups' distinct resources and interests 2 during their negotiations with public authorities helped produce a new hydrosocial territory, defined as a “spatial configuration of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology, and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of water.” 3
The coproduction of a water basin as a territory unsettles the traditional administrative categories of governance and knowledge construction, giving academic activists legitimacy to negotiate with public authorities, whereas at the same time empowering residents to both better understand their environment and to advocate for their interests. Although unequal, the alliance relies precisely on the differences between the two groups, giving them both the possibility of exchanging skills and reinforcing each other's legitimacy as actors.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The analysis of the alliance that created the watershed plan is based on a qualitative survey initiated in 2013 that used environmental and water management technical data, 15 semistructured interviews with university activists and local inhabitants as well as a 10-year-long ethnographic survey combining participant observations during meetings and field observations, as well as informal discussions with local inhabitants.
The study area is a watershed of 1184 km 2 in the southeastern part of the Valley of Mexico, officially called the Amecameca and Compañia basin, after the names of the two main rivers that cross it, and also known as the Chalco basin, after the lake located at its lowest elevation. The watershed's upstream, mountainous area, which rises to >5000 m, remains essentially rural and forested, whereas downstream, between 1200 and 2800 m, the basin covers part of the densely populated southeastern outskirts of the Mexico City megalopolis, as well as areas in the process of rapid urbanization.
Rising housing costs from the 1980s onward pushed low-income households away from the city center, leading to the unplanned urbanization of the Chalco Basin. 4 This began with self-constructed buildings in the early 1980s followed by 26 large private residential developments in the mid-2000s which currently house 380,000 inhabitants. 5 Along with agricultural workers who have lived in the area for centuries, newcomers from the city center, low-income service workers (taxicab drivers and primary school teachers), and small, mostly informal, merchants, all now call the area home.
The Chalco Basin's more than one and a half million inhabitants are distributed unevenly across a vast and topographically varied territory. However, they are all part of the city's poorest populations and the most exposed to a multitude of water management problems. The rural populations, who have been there the longest, see their access to water threatened by urbanization, whereas the new settlers are regularly confronted with problems of service. Deforestation of the upper parts of the basin erodes agricultural land and decreases groundwater recharge, the urbanization of the lower part in former drained lakes increases the risks of catastrophic seasonal flooding. Finally, the overexploitation of groundwater causes the clay soils to dry out and become compacted and cracked, a condition that affected 85% of the Valle de Chalco by 2011. 6 This damages houses and makes them more vulnerable to the region's frequent earthquakes.
From ecological planning to situated knowledge coproduction
The literature on environmental justice emphasizes that the coproduction of situated knowledge depends on user participation in collaboration with experts and activists. 7 This is very much in line with the experience of the Chalco Basin coalition in developing a water resource plan.
The Chalco Basin planning process reflects the alternative proposals developed starting in the 2000s by highly internationalized expert-activists, who proposed a sustainable urbanism and ecological, local, and circular management of water resources. The result in the Chalco was a 2011 multidisciplinary study called “Water Resource Plan for the Amecameca and Compañia Basin,” which made three main recommendations 8 : limiting urban expansion until water supply and groundwater renewal are assured; an end to the export of the basin's wastewater and rainwater; and the implementation of local storage, treatment, and reuse systems.
The plan's development was spearheaded by three researchers from Mexico City's Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) 9 : Pedro Moctezuma Barragán, Elena Burns Stuck, and Oscar Monroy. Moctezuma Barragán and Burns Stuck have a long history of activism in Mexico City's southeast, as well as extensive connections among Mexico's political, economic, and cultural elites. They conducted participatory surveys, which led to the 2005 creation of the university's Research Center for Sustainability, where Elena was appointed director. 10 A third key player is chemical engineer Dr. Oscar Monroy, who specializes in the ecological treatment of wastewater.
During this process, the academics drive the creation of a basin commission based on participatory and sustainable water management. By law, this commission must be composed of at least 50% of representatives of users, citizen organizations, and nongovernmental organizations, with the remaining seats reserved for federal, state, and municipal government.
Out of a first small group of interested residents, the academics organized the “Basin Commission Promotion Group” in 2006. They relied initially on community organizations representatives with whom they had been working since the 1990s in the context of the UAM's ecological action research projects in the region. They also sought to diversify the profile of participants by calling on former students of their university from the region such as Alberto Fernández Buendía, owner of a car resale business and member of the local business association. Jacobo Espinoza, another former student from the region, who did an internship with Elena and Pedro, was very active in the logistical aspects of this first phase.
The UAM provided financial and logistical assistance for this group's 2008 request for a general assembly. Government officials from all levels, ejidos, 11 neighborhood committee members, representatives of religious organizations, community organizations of all kinds and local business organizations were all invited. The decision to attend was heavily influenced by the widespread water-related problems and by the possibility of obtaining public funds for projects. With Oscar serving as its president, Alberto Fernández Buendíaserving as the commission's spokesperson for business owners, and Jacobo serving as one of its coordinators, the commission was approved by this first assembly.
Other local representatives included Genaro Amaro, a former supermarket employee in his 60s, who was among the first migrants to the area in the 1990s. The community museum he runs serves as a social and cultural center and acted as a base for the academics. An intense consultation process then began with local residents. The academics conducted an extensive participatory survey with the assistance of numerous local community organizations to identify issues and the best local partners to address them. The Water Resource Plan for the Amecameca and Compaia Basin was published in 2011 after 128 field trips, 27 local meetings, 12 zonal workshops, and 6 regional meetings.
After the water resource plan was created, the coproduction of situated knowledge continued between users, activists, and scientists. Individuals called “environmental monitors” provide the researchers with logistical support (accommodation, food, transportation, etc.) and local knowledge. Inhabitants trained by the academic researchers participated directly in data production through their day-to-day use of local infrastructure and experience of environmental problems. Through their cell phones, they continue to send geolocated photos and measurements of soil fractures to geologists, who then analyze them remotely. Carlos Vargas, a geologist from the Sustainability Research Center explains:
“We showed them how to use their GPS. We want them to become the monitors of their own territory […], so they don't depend on us, so they can send observations and measurements to us afterward so we can analyze them and then return the results to them to share with their neighbors and public authorities.
12
”
In exchange, the inhabitants obtain precise expertise and technical reports on fracturing and subsidence. Irma, a small businesswoman and leader of a neighborhood committee in the large Villas de San Martin development (15,750 inhabitants), explains why this is important:
“I am very proud because now there is a report written by the Center for Sustainability Research. This is not just any institution; it is among the best! The geologist that we brought here, he is not just anyone! He has a Ph.D. in subsoils. We gave him gas money; we gave him a place to stay. I say all this with a lot of pride because it's going to help us all. And then Carlitos made me a co-author of the report!”
13
This expertise is utilized during inhabitants' negotiations with local authorities, including on occasion, to achieve objectives that contradict the 2010 plan's goals. This happened with Irma, who in seeking the drilling of a new well, relied on the knowledge she had acquired to challenge the technical skills of the mayor.
“I said to him: “You are an architect, Sir, you are not going to fool me, you may have studied, but you don't know anything about subsoils, that's not what you studied.” 14
The symbolic and material exchanges with academics create the conditions for various inhabitants to autonomously defend their own vision of what is fair, or a grounded water justice. Beyond the uses that each makes of this collaboration, these exchanges, nurtured over time, in turn, affect the (re)appropriation of the local territory.
Production of chalco basin as an hydrosocial territory and common reappropriation of space
Naming, defining, and understanding water injustice depends on the territorial scale under consideration. 15 In this sense, the constitution of the Chalco basin as a new territorial scale, based on scholarly research, enables a redefinition of the problems suffered by its inhabitants as a systemic consequence of regional water mismanagement and not as a series of micro-local and isolated incidents. The decision to change the official name to the Amecameca and Compañia Basin rather than Chalco basin makes the entire basin the relevant scale for action, rather than only the area surrounding the lake. This definition is meant to assist residents in making sense of the possible solutions to their environmental issues. This is facilitated by a digital synthesis of the plan provided to local community organizations in glossy paper format. It includes maps, three-dimensional models, diagrams, and photos that provide residents a visual overview of the basin and its ecological dynamics, which are difficult to perceive as a whole otherwise. 16
The newly defined basin is an intermediate scale that transcends and challenges the usual institutional descriptions that do not respect the watershed's boundaries. This goes hand in hand with the alliance's questioning of the monopoly of government authorities over these territories. As the watershed does not correspond to the municipal and federal water management districts and overlaps 14 municipalities (4 within the administrative boundaries of Mexico City, and 10 in the neighboring state of Mexico), the alliance's definition challenges the federal state's focus on building large hydraulic infrastructure (often responsible for interbasin water transfers). While the federal government planned to export the region's wastewater to the world's largest water treatment facility in Atotonilco, Hidalgo state, the alliance successfully convinced the State of Mexico to build nine small treatment plants in 2012, which encouraged local water reuse in line with the Water Resource Plan.
The joint mobilization of inhabitants and academics around the Water Resource Plan has interconnected space, environmental, and scholarly interpretation frameworks on the one hand, with social and communitarian on the other. Residents have gained an environmental perspective as a result of long-term contact with academics. Instead of being passive agents of the expertise provided by the researchers, residents take ownership of this interpretation grid and integrate it to read their environment.
An example is found in Jacobo, who although had no previous technical training has become a hydrological infrastructure expert, now working professionally as an environmental officer for a local municipality. Knowledgeable in making technical language understandable to local people, in cooperation with the Basin Commission and an NGO, he now leads a group of residents who demand the operation and renovation of the wastewater treatment plants completed in 2012 that municipalities quickly abandoned once they ran out of operating funds. During a December 2020 visit by government officials to one of the plants, this newfound technical grasp of the issues was evident in the statement of a resident facing water scarcity problems:
“Several years ago, here in the community, we had artisanal wells of 5 or 6 meters where we could still get water. Today, the water level is almost 60 meters and continues to drop, there is no infiltration from other sources anymore, and water is removed from our basin. This is a concern for us.”
Genaro and the young volunteers who run the community museum with him now create YouTube videos and plan cultural events that repurpose the Water Resource Plan's maps and diagrams. They also regularly schedule excursions to the nearby Xico Hill, where they attempt to block urbanization. The panoramic views from the hilltop reveal how the urban expansion is affecting the region's hydrology. In 2022, 22-year-old museum volunteer Yair Esparza explained to some 40 neighbors:
A water plan was published a few years ago, a very important study that illustrates the necessity of aquifer recharge zones, the importance of conserving them without urbanization so that water can infiltrate. That is why we defend Xico Hill because it is important for everyone's access to water, but also because it is one of the few remaining green areas (…) it is important to see that everything is related at the watershed level as well, to change our relationship with nature.
17
The academics' perception of what the territory signifies has also been modified through contact with the local communities. Although social scientists such as Elena and Pedro learned more about the complexity faced by the inhabitants, it is engineering or natural sciences researchers, such as Oscar or Carlos, who have their interpretative schemes shaken up the most, as the inhabitants help them grasp how critical social dynamics are in the local ecology. Their collaboration led the academics to prioritize the participation of a multitude of community organizations in the Water Resources Plan: users' cooperatives, neighborhood assemblies, and informal collectives managing water supply wells.
However, scalar politics also make visible the differences in resources between academics and residents. By acquiring new knowledge and adopting the geographical scale of the watershed, the inhabitants have strengthened their legitimacy to negotiate with the municipalities, which remain the most accessible and relevant authority from their perspective. Elena and Pedro, in contrast, rely on the legitimacy they have gained, and the logistical capacity provided by the Research Center for Sustainability and the Basin Commission to take the lead in a national campaign for the right to water.
This campaign presented a citizens' initiative law in 2019, which led to Elena's 2020 appointment as deputy director of the National Water Commission. Although these differences can create tensions between local inhabitants and academics, the alliance has remained active for >10 years precisely because such differences create opportunities to establish legitimacy and exchange resources. For example, in 2022, Elena reactivated the networks built during the development of the watershed plan in 2011 in an effort to use her new government position to allocate federal subsidies for the rehabilitation of Lake Chalco.
CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
Analyzing the collaboration between academics and residents of working-class neighborhoods over a 10-year period around sustainable planning in the southeastern outskirts of Mexico City offers insights into how water justice movements bring together heterogeneous sets of agents that together contribute to the recognition of users as legitimate actors in water management. Each party supports the other to develop legitimacy through the coproduction of a participatory institution, situated knowledge, and new hydrosocial territory.
The establishment of a basin commission sought to establish official recognition of the inhabitants and to guarantee them access to decision making by activating the legal participation mechanisms, while also providing democratic legitimacy to academics. This led to the collaborative work on a Water Resource Plan, which led to >10 years of collaboration that has allowed academics access to local knowledge and inhabitants access to scientific knowledge to build a grounded vision of water justice. This process contributed to the recognition of the Chalco basin as a new hydrosocial territory. This has provided both groups a common schema of analysis that supports ecological alternatives to governmental policies.
This case study, like other studies of similar experiences in Mexico 18 and around the world, 19 reveals the difficulty of participatory water management in achieving one of the key issues of water justice: exercising democratic control over government entities. If we focus on the official mechanisms of participation such as the basin commission or the water resource plan, it would indeed appear that this experiment was unsuccessful. Neither of these procedures has resulted in the hoped-for integral transformation of the region's water management.
Most of the proposals for ecological and participatory water management in the 2010 Plan and those resulting from more than a decade of collaborative work between academics and residents are still unimplemented. On the whole, the Chalco Basin environmental alliance, lacking its own budget and dependent on the goodwill of public authorities, has had to content itself with small victories, on an ad hoc basis, far from the systemic ambitions of participatory basin management. In contrast, this case study highlights the processes of material and symbolic (re)appropriation of the space that have taken place during this collaboration, leading academics, and inhabitants to integrate common cognitive frameworks, whether in reference scales, interpretation grids, or at the crossroads of a social vision and an environmental vision or in the creation of the Chalco basin as a hydrosocial territory.
This convergence is forming a new community of water experts, both community and academic, who, in the absence of functional participatory mechanisms, are seeking to enter governmental bodies, changing their sociological composition, and potentially transforming public policies toward greater access to water justice.
Footnotes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is grateful to the interviewees. With special thanks to the residents of Valle de Chalco and academics at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana. Also to Linda Farthing, who assisted with editing and framing and Audrey Chérubin, whose analysis served as the foundation of an earlier version of this article.
DISCLAIMER
The author confirms sole responsibility for the following: study conception and design; data collection, analysis, and interpretation of results; and article preparation.
AUTHOR DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No competing financial interests exist.
FUNDING INFORMATION
This research was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) of France and the Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Tecnologías (Conacyt) of Mexico.