Struggles for water and autonomy in Mexico City’s south

Ancestral farming techniques still used in Xochimilco involve floating harvests and provide a great deal of the produce consumed in Mexico City. Photo © Pablo Pérez Garcia.

Reportage • Pablo Pérez Garcia• December 6, 2024 • Leer en castellano

On December second, a boisterous gathering at the Casa del Pueblo Tlamachitloyan, in the southern reaches of Mexico City, brought locals together to talk, listen to live music and enjoy a delicious meal. The celebration was a commemoration of an act of repression against the people of San Gregorio Atlapulco. Exactly two years prior, more than 300 police officers attacked Indigenous Xochimilca residents to break a blockade that they had organized to stop the installation of a pipeline that would extract water from their community to supply urbanized areas in Mexico City.

Even though traffic is always heavy on the entire hour-and-a-half-long commute—by subway, light rail and bus—from the city center, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that this town is part of Mexico’s capital city. Things slow down when you arrive. After climbing the long, heavy steps of Mount Moyotepec, the view from the Casa del Pueblo offers a panorama of the entire Anahuac Valley. On one side, there are lagoons and canals and, on the other, resplendent green hills.

For the people of San Gregorio Atlapulco, who are known as Chicuarotes, the December celebration was yet another chapter in their long history of resistance. In his memoir of the town written in 1957, Professor Sóstenes Chapa wrote that the town was a place filled with “people who were born fighting for their lands and who live to defend them.” He narrates how they have defended themselves against threats to the land since the arrival of Spanish plantation owner Juan Merodio in 1595.

The Casa del Pueblo Tlamachitloyan in San Gregorio Atlapulco, in the southern periphery of Mexico City. Photo © Pablo Pérez Garcia.

Today the struggle in San Gregorio Atlapulco is as alive as ever. Residents are fighting for water and against touristification and urbanization processes that threaten agricultural activities in a town that produces 30 tons of vegetables daily, but where the canals that make Xochimilco—of which San Gregorio Atlapulco is part—famous worldwide are at risk of drying out.

What some regard as a tourist attraction is in fact a work of agricultural engineering that makes the Chihuarotes proud. Locals consider the chinampas, a pre-Hispanic technique of cultivating crops on artificial islets that takes advantage of the fertile silt at the bottom of the canals, to be a way of relating to the wetlands. Today, many chinampas are abandoned due to lack of water or because sinking caused by overexploitation has rendered them unusable.

The Casa del Pueblo Tlamachitloyan, formerly the Adolfo López Mateos community library, plays key role in their struggle. The community built it more than fifty years ago. The 2017 earthquake forced them to abandon it but, sometime afterward, the mayor of Xochimilco began to oversee renovations.

After the December 2022 crackdown on the community, then interim Head of Government of Mexico City, Martí Batres, promised to return the building to the people of San Gregorio Atlapulco. But then officials classified it as part of the Pueblos Mágicos [Magical Towns] tourism program. That program filled the towns with large, colorful individual letters spelling out place names, promoting the arrival of travelers from all over the world and presenting the daily life of the Xochimilca people as a spectacle for tourists.

Autonomy and water

Hortensia Telésforo is a teacher and member of the Permanent General Assembly of San Gregorio Atlapulco, which organized a sit-in at the end of 2023 to recover the library. For her, the government’s idea of magical towns is little more than a bad joke.

Hortensia Telésforo is a school teacher and member of the Permanent General Assembly of San Gregorio Atlapulco. Photo © Pablo Pérez Garcia.

“Jose Carlos Acosta [then mayor of Xochimilco] came and told us we are Indigenous,” said Telésforo. "Who does he think he is? These letters are a mockery: for over 30 years we’ve had to deal with sewage seeping into our canals and chinampas, which are the most important places in our village."

After the community took back the Casa del Pueblo, the mayor's office of Xochimilco, which members of the Morena party lead, filed a lawsuit against Telésforo in December 2023. Residents of San Gregorio Atlapulco organized a protest to demand that he drop the suit, which led to another round of repression by individuals with protection from local police on September 6, 2024. Authorities not only failed to stop the aggression, but they also arrested four members of the Assembly and a journalist, accusing them of assaulting employees of the mayor's office. City police later beat more than ten people who showed up to protest the arrests. Authorities released all the detainees that night. Authorities charged five with non-existent crimes such as “rioting.” Those arrested state that police beat them while holding them inside the Tlalpan Public Prosecutor's Office.

At the heart of the conflict is the fact that politicians from Morena refuse to allow the community to manage its own public space. They say it should be managed by a coordinator who is also an employee of the mayor's office. But members of the Assembly reject this proposal, which, they believe, limits their autonomy.

“It's not that we are against the mayor's office,” said Telésforo during an interview in the Casa Del Pueblo. “If our history has that [communitarian] vision]... the least that we as Atlapulquenses can do is to reclaim the conditions that allowed our people to flourish... We were a rich town but, little by little, they took away the water and now we have become, statistically, an impoverished area.”

Water is inevitably part of any discussion of the lives of the people of Xochimilco.

Work, culture and organization

The latest protest took place on November 21, a few meters from the Tulyehualco pyramid, where the public company Water Systems of Mexico City (SACMEX), which extracts almost 70 percent of the water used in Mexico City, drilled a well that they claimed was for maintenance. Sócrates Galicia stood at the edge of the road with a megaphone and expressed residents' discontent with the drilling. SACMEX began drilling without first consulting the community, which the government of Mexico City had promised to do in 2022.

Sócrates Galicia is a chinampero, a farmer who works the floating soil beds in the canal system. Photo © Pablo Pérez Garcia.

“The pipelines are always directed toward [central] Mexico City,” Galicia explained, as the protest wound down. “Never toward neighborhoods or towns that don't have water.”

Galicia is not only a Chicuarote but also a chinampero, a farmer specialized in the ancestral technology that takes advantage of the water and the richness of the silt in the canals of Xochimilco to produce a great deal of the food consumed in Mexico City.

“I know what it feels like to plant and eat vegetables that I grow and what it feels like to be in dialogue with the life that surrounds us,” Galicia explains. “I don’t see water as a natural resource but as a living being that should be treated with respect and defended. I think that’s our duty.”

Galicia is part of the Assembly and also of the Casa del Pueblo, where he teaches music workshops. Volunteers run the cultural activities in the community space, a bit like the faena—a kind of communal work bee—in which farmers and neighbors get together to set up a chinampa or prepare a canal to withstand the dry season. There is faena work in the fields and cultural faena in the Casa del Pueblo that is done to strengthen community ties.

“It's not just about defense of our territory,” says Galicia. “It's about defending generations to come.”

Against extraction

Like many residents in San Gregorio Atlapulco, Juan Galicia (who is not related to Socrates) understands the struggle for water is not new for his community. We spoke next to a water pipe on which someone had painted, “It's not drought, it's theft.” He is quick to cite historical precedents that show that water has been extracted indiscriminately from reservoirs beneath his family lands since 1900.

Juan Galicia says the theft of water from his community must be stopped. Knowing the history of their people and their resistance has been key to the success of their mobilizations. Photo © Pablo Pérez Garcia.

“We used to harvest sacks of corn, beans and broad beans, and all that planting served to contain the rainwater,” he recalls. “There were agaves planted to mark property lines, pulque was produced, the land was worked in terraces. It was a holistic system that allowed the aquifers to recover. What we have now is erosion.”

Galicia, who has lived his entire life in San Gregorio Atlapulco, blames a lack of respect for natural water cycles for the sinkholes, drought and other negative environmental impacts. He says that ecological damage has negative impacts that are more than just economic. Threats to the cultivation of the chinampas threaten who they are.

“Those 30 tons [of vegetables] that we produce daily for the central food distribution market represent, in my calculation, production from the 10 or 15 percent of chinampas that are operational,” said Juan Galicia. “Many have stopped producing, half of the chinampas have sunk because of sinkholes caused by indiscriminate water extraction.”

For years, he has urged officials to end the practice of extracting more water than what is captured during the rainy season. He and others in the community argue that for every well drilled, a “recharging well” should be drilled first. This would promote the reintegration of rainwater into the water table, thus ensuring water reserves.

“Of course we are not against using water,” said Galicia. “What we are against is indiscriminate plunder, against water being taken away from us.”