OnStopping the Old Rio Grande
New York Review of Books Online, 11 January 2024
“For two hundred years Zapata was a community stitched to the Rio Grande. Residents drew on its water for their household needs, planned their summer crop plantings around its seasonal floods, and crossed the bridge over it to buy groceries and see family on the other side, in the Mexican town of Guerrero.
The buildings around the town’s central plaza—a two-story courthouse, the Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, and the primary school that doubled as a movie theater—were built from sandstone hand-cut from the banks of the Rio Grande. The town’s dirt roads would shift during flood season, following new paths that rain carved toward the river during storms. ‘I would go and sit on the riverbank, just listening to the water gurgling and watching it flow. It mesmerized me,’ Hildegardo Flores, now eighty, told me about his childhood in Zapata. ‘I would come home and build my own river, a little canal between our two orange trees.’
All that changed in 1950, when the governments of Mexico and the US began construction on the Falcon Dam downstream.”
Appearance on the Cognitive Dissidents podcast: https://www.cognitive.investments/podcast?utm_source=guest_link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=q2_23&utm_content=partner-link
Flood Justice in the Borderlands podcast (Bilingüe!): https://jsw.arizona.edu/multimedia/podcasts/lucas-belury-flood-justice-in-the-us-mexico-borderlands-iii/
New York Review of Books Online, 11 January 2024
“For two hundred years Zapata was a community stitched to the Rio Grande. Residents drew on its water for their household needs, planned their summer crop plantings around its seasonal floods, and crossed the bridge over it to buy groceries and see family on the other side, in the Mexican town of Guerrero.
The buildings around the town’s central plaza—a two-story courthouse, the Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, and the primary school that doubled as a movie theater—were built from sandstone hand-cut from the banks of the Rio Grande. The town’s dirt roads would shift during flood season, following new paths that rain carved toward the river during storms. ‘I would go and sit on the riverbank, just listening to the water gurgling and watching it flow. It mesmerized me,’ Hildegardo Flores, now eighty, told me about his childhood in Zapata. ‘I would come home and build my own river, a little canal between our two orange trees.’
All that changed in 1950, when the governments of Mexico and the US began construction on the Falcon Dam downstream.”
Appearance on the Cognitive Dissidents podcast: https://www.cognitive.investments/podcast?utm_source=guest_link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=q2_23&utm_content=partner-link
Flood Justice in the Borderlands podcast (Bilingüe!): https://jsw.arizona.edu/multimedia/podcasts/lucas-belury-flood-justice-in-the-us-mexico-borderlands-iii/