Like so many brown-skinned inhabitants of the Americas, the Río Grande may not be beautiful through European eyes. In the desert reaches of the Americas though, the brown waters of the lower Río Grande are a beautiful, living-giving force. She is but another form of Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec goddess of water. She is the protector of mothers in childbirth, babies, fishermen, and navigators.
The Aztec view of water as a goddess bestows an attribute of vitality to the environment that the Anglo-centric ideas of the American Dream, Manifest Destiny, and capitalism violate when people pollute and misuse the river. When Texas Governor Greg Abbott put buoys and concertina wire in the Río Grande to “deter immigrants,” a euphemism for killing refugees traveling across the border, he made Chalchiuhtlicue an unwilling accomplice to the murder of her children.
But Mexicans showed up in a different context during the July 4 floods of the Guadalupe River, a parallel river that like the Río Grande flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Rescue teams from Mexican organization Fundación 911 in Acuña, Coahuila, didn’t just answer a call for help, they called officials in Kerr County, TX, to collaborate.
When Texas Governor Greg Abbott put buoys and concertina wire in the Río Grande to “deter immigrants”…he made Chalchiuhtlicue an unwilling accomplice to the murder of her children.
Fundación 911 trains for rescuing people from disasters like these. But beyond natural disasters, US federal policy and political performance of violence against refugees and asylum seekers compels the organization to do river rescues to prevent the targeted deaths of Latin American migrants crossing into the United States. That training served Texans well as the Mexicans helped search for lost girls from Camp Mystic and residents of Kerr County.
The Folly of Political Control
About 75 percent of water withdrawn from the Río Grande supports agriculture. The river provides drinking water for about 6 million people. Because the river serves as a border between two countries, traversing three states in the United States and another three in Mexico, a chaotic mess of treaties, agreements, and regulations governs use of the water. Government control over the Río Grande makes her a sister to women in the United States in not having bodily autonomy. When I see flooding, I wonder whether Chalchiuhtlicue is exerting her own power against political control.
The river is militarized where a substantial number of Brown folk live by and rely on the bounty of the river.
While climate change is currently exacerbating extreme weather, flooding is a natural phenomenon that occurs to bodies of water like the Río Grande and its natural patterns must be respected. We treat floods as something to control instead of an integral part of water’s life cycle. Flooding births fertile plains. Why would you want to control that power instead of simply making room for that magic?
We prioritize the vanity of a riverside view over the integral power of flooding—at our peril. Kerr County boasts the second-highest concentration of millionaires in Texas. Some of the camps along the Guadalupe River, like Camp Mystic, are quite exclusive and host children from these families. Yet footage from Kerr County meetings splashed all over social media showed county officials refusing federal money to help with flood warning systems.
Who Calls Chalchiuhtlicue Home?
In the United States, the racial demographics along the river are varied. Mexican Americans comprise 12 percent of Colorado’s population, 50 percent of New Mexico’s population, and 45 percent of Texas’s population. In South Texas, along the river, the Mexican American population shoots up to 84 percent.
These demographic differences connect to cultural differences in how people think about the river. To offer a very broad generalization: Up north, White people play on the river; in the south, Hispanos and Tejanos depend on the river. Moreover, the river is militarized along the US Southern border, where a substantial number of Brown folk live by and rely on its bounty of the river.
These dynamics stretch back through time, through generations of settlement, exploration, and exploitation on the river.
In recent history, the United States and Mexican governments built two reservoirs off of the Río Grande, Lake Amistad near Del Rio, TX, and Lake Falcon near Zapata, TX. In 1953, when unanticipated flooding forced the US citizens out of San Ygnacio and Zapata before the official first reservoir filling, the US government compensated the Tejanos less than the original value of the land because the area was suddenly and conveniently considered flood-prone and worth less than land that hadn’t flooded for generations. People on the US side were moved into a tent city while their Mexican counterparts moved into the newly built Mexican city of Nueva Ciudad Guerrero that, while looking industrial and soulless, provided shelter, water, and sewage services to its citizens.
Further back, before the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo demarcated the Río Grande a political border, the river fed generations of Spanish settlers along both banks. And before the Spaniards arrived, the river nourished countless generations of Coahuiltecan tribes that lived on the tropical desert plains that angle into the Gulf of Mexico. Today, the Tejanos, those descended from the Spanish and Indigenous people of the area, live along the Río Grande as it stretches from the Gulf through the state of Coahuila. People on both banks of the river are part of the Tejano culture of this area, despite proclamations and borders that intend to divide us.
When Monterrey was founded in 1596 on the flood plains of the Santa Catarina River, those early Regiomontanos, the cultural ancestors of the Tejanos, did not understand the nature of the plains and their fledging city was wiped out in a flood in 1611. Nearly 150 years later, their descendant—my eighth great-grandfather—Don Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera, founded Laredo on the banks of the Río Grande. But things went a little differently for him. I’m going to take a some literary liberty here as his descendant and propose the following: Don Tomás had likely heard the oral history of the flood and maybe through an ancestral gift of his Mesoamerican mothers heeded the advice of Chalchiuhtlicue. He founded the town close to the river but not on a flood plain. Although our family home sat two blocks from the river, our house never flooded.
As a city girl, I hear Chalchiuhtlicue and feel her life giving-force, even if I am not technically an environmentalist.
A Life Force and Neighbor
The Río Grande is a life-giving force as well as a complex neighbor. She is a long river, the fifth-longest in the United States and the 20th-longest in the world. She is also one of the 10 most endangered rivers in the world. It’s no surprise that when we overuse her or in times of drought, she can be stingy. When it’s rainy, she can flood us with her generosity. How do we repay the kindness of such a neighbor? First, the arrogance of the United States government needs to be checked. Instead, look to the long-term inhabitants of Turtle Island who have the longest relationship with this land.
Modern Western environmental views often separate nature and urbanization, but they can exist in harmony. Nature exists in our cities, but we often pave over it instead of engaging in a communal dialogue. As a city girl, I hear Chalchiuhtlicue and feel her life-giving force, even if I am not technically an environmentalist. I sometimes consider my ability to hear Chalchiuhtlicue as an ancestral gift from my Mesoamerican mothers. I then remember the long list of water goddesses throughout the world and wonder whether they, too, are reaching out, trying to sprinkle their children with a similar gift. The flow of the dialogue makes all the difference.
At her source near the Continental Divide in the mountains of Colorado, the Río Grande starts as a collection of spring water and snowmelt so her water is cold and clear. As she winds her way south, cutting through the high desert, tall, willowy álamos (Cottonwood trees) line the banks like slender-hipped ballerinas. Where the Río Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, the river is brown and silty from her long path through the desert plains and now the ladies-in-waiting dotting the banks are stout mesquites and graceful huisaches (acacias).
When many of us get water by simply turning a tap, we tend to forget the bodies of water that bless us with this hydration, much less where they are located. Modernity obscures our relationship to nature. But whenever I go by water, whether a spring, a river, a lake, or through a rainfall, I always hear Chalchiuhtlicue whisper a hello to me.
