* by: Claudia Elvira Romero Herrera
I order that a hundred paces from said ditch there be no traces or butcher shop and that in the district of two hundred cattle that are killed are not dumped or anything of this kind is washed, neither clothing nor any part of said ditch (… ) that garbage dumps are not made next to the sewers and those that exist are removed.
(Department of the Querétaro River 1654)
The eighteenth century arrived in the city of Santiago de Querétaro dragging a dilemma from the end of the previous century: remove or leave the sources of contamination of Río Blanco. 40 years earlier, the viceroyalty’s distribution of waters already stipulated precautionary measures, imposing monetary and corporal penalties on those who disobeyed them. All users had the obligation to build works to contain or divert contaminated water and the textile workshops had to be placed at the end of the entire distribution system. Before, pre-colonial communities already limited the entry of animals into the springs or the installation of crops on their margins to prevent dirt.
The owners of the obrajes, the main causes of contamination, faced an ultimatum in 1700 based on the accumulation of complaints from the inhabitants: stop contaminating or pay. After years of discussing the alternatives, the City Council, made up largely of workers, decided to entrust the artificial conduction of water from the town of La Cañada to various commissioners, including the famous Marqués de la Villa del Villar. The work was financed by him, the clergy, the residents and the workers. It was anticipated that the latter would contribute the highest percentage. However, despite the pressure exerted by the then viceroy with studies certifying the damage caused by their activities, they refused, resisted and breached the agreements.
With the lime and pebble aqueduct, one of the most representative Queretaro icons, a decision was settled on the fate of the river and the entire city: clean waters above, dirty waters below.
Like many other Mexican cities of the viceregal period, large bodies of water were considered an undesirable or negligible element. Not far from Querétaro, since 1521 the 45 rivers and five large lakes of Tenochtitlán had begun to dry up, transforming a community communicated by canals and sustained by agroecosystems that tried to bring the land to the water, into a city of avenues settled on rivers, committed to in transporting water to land. Today, one of the most unsustainable in the world, highly vulnerable to earthquakes and dependent on increasingly distant aquifers.
In all corners of the 21st century, societies are betting on reversing the historical error of drying up, diverting and piping water. Partly because nature does not stop demonstrating that they always return to their course, as proven by the floods in Mexico City or the return of the Santa Catarina River in Monterrey after Hurricane Alex. In part, also, because awareness of the inevitable interdependence between human beings and the ecosystem to which they belong is being recovered.
Forgetting the origin of the problem of the Queretaro river coined and still reinforces today a false discourse of water scarcity, when in reality what has been scarce is surface water, or rather, water free of contaminants. The Querétaro aquifer, spread over 460 square kilometers of the valley’s subsoil, has been unfairly judged by the superficial flow of its rain-fed river, when the fertility of its lands always spoke of the fertility of its mantles. Fertility that ancient chronicles, recent research and the abundance that, even today, sustains multiple forms of life attest to.
Photograph taken from the Facebook pages Querétaro Antiguo and Desde el Marqués
Yesterday, the Blanco River was the starting point of the water conduction system that irrigated the orchards through which the 5 kilometers of ditches passed, which extended 2 centuries later to 62 kilometers that also fed irrigation and industry. Today, the Querétaro River, whose regular flow was progressively diminished since the mid-20th century, still joins the Apaseo River along with the El Pueblito and Juriquilla rivers to flow into the Lerma. Since the city was founded, it has received contaminants without, therefore, giving up the ecosystem benefits that, although cloudy in color and fetid in its smell, still continue to give.
Photograph taken from the Querétaro Antiguo and Desde el Marqués Facebook sites.
If a count of sources of contamination is made, there is no point that is saved. The traces that dumped cattle waste into the main ditch in 1600 today correspond to the rancherías of cattle-raising areas in the municipality of El Marqués, the obraje dumps of 1700 became the residues of the 19th century textile factories and today are wastewater from industrial parks, and the drains from the old water system continue to be domestic drains from both old neighborhoods and new subdivisions. The laws, existing today as then, remain unfulfilled.
Despite the attempts to rescue and preserve the Querétaro river that have been made in the past, until now no government has been able to guarantee its protection or achieve its recovery, partly justifying itself in the complexity of operating the spheres of competence. Municipal and state authorities «play the ball» when they do not shield themselves in federal jurisdiction, making it difficult for complaints about discharges in different parts of the city to become sanctions.
Citizen initiatives to rescue the river are emerging today as has been seen before. The obligatory question is: what has been missing? How far can the citizen effort go? Do we have the procedures and tools to clean up? Should the government do it? How to assume co-responsibility without causing a delimitation of responsibilities? Is it enough to clean it if it will continue to get dirty?, if dirty water discharges persist, if it is cleaned only at the height of a section. How to also do to remove the sources of contamination?
1. Dry bed of the Santa Catarina river in 2009. (Source: website of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León) 2. Bed of the Santa Catarina river during Hurricane Alex, 2010. (Source: Water for Monterrey: Achievements, challenges and opportunities ) 3. Santa Catarina riverbed in October 2018. (Source: photo shared on the El Río Está Vivo Facebook page)
What has the recovery of rivers like the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, the Tagus in Lisbon or the Thames in London depended on? What can Querétaro learn from its many experiences of failure to clean up an aquifer that has endured centuries of silent resistance, not decades? Is it really possible to rescue him?
A Spanish acquaintance told me with great pride how the population and government had managed to rescue the river in his hometown by joining great efforts for a common interest. Commenting to a French friend that in Mexico the attempts were not achieved due to a lack of political will, he replied that «had there been a lack of will, things would have changed a long time ago.» “You have to call the wolf by his name. What there are are interests”.
I wonder if interest in one thing generates a lack of interest in another, such as avoiding a cost associated with treatment methods, preserving a mode of production, a way of life, or comfort over that which, once used, is undesirable in my perimeter but becomes irrelevant in that of others. I wonder if it’s part of the thread of self-critical reflection that our good intentions have been missing.
There are those who look with disgust at «the channel» of «pure black waters» who «did not know it was a river». The same one in which the riverside residents from different parts of the city remember having bathed and washed clothes no more than 20 years ago, where ducks swam no more than 6 years ago. They themselves remind us that when looking at the water that runs through the city different perceptions underlie simultaneously, jumping in the same conversation the phrases «I think we could already see it as a channel, its sources are no longer clean water, it is more a source of infection» or «The trees, who waters them? Nobody, and they are always leafy”.
To save the river, it must be assumed that the rescue is a long process, that it does not correspond to a single actor or a single time, that requires collective collaboration and administrative continuity. And plan accordingly. Beginning by knowing who is working on it, to be able to add. Making transparent the information of those from the government or academia who say they are active, but few of us know how, if investing resources, producing research, monitoring or developing technologies. Enabling a linking space that is urgent to transcend scattered, truncated and failed efforts, where we can put the difficulties encountered on the table.
Perhaps we also have to stop seeing the river in the way that has led us to have it the way we have it and start seeing it in a way that allows us to have it the way we want it. As a cultural space and epicenter of biological life, which, being a body of water, and given the hydrological cycle, can be cleaned if the source of contamination is suspended. Seeing it as what it has always been, but we stopped seeing it centuries ago, when behind the romantic myth of the benefactor marquis the dilemmas and conflicting interests were hidden. Polluters linked to political power who, refusing to stop polluting, preferred to opt for an artificial system that resolved immediately but established a sentence for the future. Residents who, in the comfort of conducting clean water for their homes and businesses, accepted a decision without which today we would not have a problem. A dilemma that seems to remain in force between the temptation to intubate and the intention to recover the Querétaro River.
Who does not know its history, they say…
* Historical compilation based on archival review and scholarly research consultation
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