Sowing Water in Toxic Times
Oscar Ulloa Calzada | Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas, Mexico | ulloacalzadao@gmail.com
Toxicity in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico, names a condition where ecological decay and political design converge. This slow violence, born from decades of extractivist expansion and administrative centralization, was inaugurated by a 1967 presidential decree proscribing groundwater extraction by Ben’zaa communities. This juridico-technocratic device reconfigured water from an organizing landscape presence into an object of calculation, converting a hydrological commons animated by ritual into an agricultural expanse for production. In doing so, it subordinated ritual and communal assemblies to managerial abstraction and imposed a monistic rationality upon a plural world.
This register of toxicity is thus more than chemical; it is at once bureaucratic and ontological. It manifests as a slow poisoning of the trust between communities and aquifers, the depletion of collective assemblies, and the silencing of more-than-human entities—such as rain deities and mountain guardians—whose reality persists in situated ecologies of practice (Ulloa 2024). By circulating through institutions and imaginaries, this toxic order recalibrated reality itself, narrowing ontological possibility to a single, normative regime.
The state imposed upon the valleys a singular framework, a modern abstraction that severed “water” from its relational entanglements (Linton & Budds 2014; Linton 2010) and systematically marginalized the plural ontology of Indigenous communities. Through developmentalist tropes that privileged extractive productivity over relational accountability (Escobar 2018; Gudynas 2011), this created a lived toxicity manifested as scarcity and alienation. This corrosive dispossession reconfigured water into an administrable substance while fracturing the hydrosocial bonds that render collective worlds inhabitable (Boelens 2015; Linton & Budds 2014).
In response, antidotes emerged from within the valleys themselves. Around the turn of the millennium, the Coordinadora de Pueblos Unidos por el Cuidado y la Defensa del Agua (COPUDA), a coalition of seventeen villages, coalesced to dispute the decree and the world it sustained. Their approach was simultaneously political and cosmopolitical (Ulloa 2024), reconfiguring water governance as a relational field where humans, saints, aquifers, and institutions must be composed together (de la Cadena 2015; Linton & Budds 2014; Stengers 2010). Within this framework, toxicity is countered not by technocratic correction, but by practices that rearticulate ontological commitments and hydrosocial bonds
The practice of sembrar agua—sowing water—serves as the community’s antidote. While appearing as a technical intervention involving infiltration wells and recharge ponds, it fundamentally combines engineering design with ceremonial and communal labor. Each act of construction is also an act of repair, inaugurated with offerings and shared meals to mend the relations between people and water, reaffirming aquifers as living bodies rather than inert reservoirs. As a situated design practice, sowing water thus couples managed aquifer recharge with collective obligation and ritual address, aligning engineering with plural ontologies of care (Linton 2010; Stengers 2010). Its purpose is not merely to mitigate scarcity but to reopen the conditions for inhabiting a multiplicity of worlds in common.
I remember attending one such gathering in San Antonino Castillo Velasco in the summer of 2024. The day opened with a tequio—the communal labor through which each household contributes to the common good—where men and women arrived with shovels, pickaxes, and buckets, some with infants secured to their backs. By midday, a broad pit had been cut, stone-lined, and readied to receive the first rains. At the edge of the excavation, elders arranged a modest altar of candles, maize, and flowers; a bottle of mezcal circulated hand to hand, each sip sealing a covenant that linked participants with the presences addressed in prayer—spirits, mountain guardians, and the earth itself—whose cooperation sustains life in the valleys. Tortillas and beans followed, laughter braided with fatigue, and the new pond received a prayer. In this interplay of labor, offering, and conviviality, tequio and ritual compose a single register of sociality and obligation long described in Oaxaca under the banner of comunalidad (Martínez 2009).
Sowing water counters toxicity by composing relations, understanding infrastructures as non-neutral thresholds where worlds are negotiated. In opposition to the technocratic fiction of a single world, this practice articulates a plurality coordinated through ritual and hydrosocial design, integrating managed aquifer recharge with reciprocal obligations. The resulting antidote is not a cure that purges toxicity, but a collective practice that transmutes it. Toxic exposure thus becomes a sharpened perception of fractures in state design, catalyzing the reconfiguration of relations and the creation of infrastructures for dignity. It constitutes a form of repair that aligns technical work with ritual and communal obligation, reopening pathways previously closed by the toxicity inherent in a singular, state-imposed world.
The antidote cultivated by COPUDA concerns not only water but the authority to define reality. While their nearly two-decade struggle of assemblies, legal action, and hydrological experimentation culminated in the 2021 rescission of a restrictive 1967 decree, their more enduring achievement was learning to articulate their cosmology in political terms. By asserting situated truths—that aquifers are alive and require offerings—they brought their world into conversation with state officials, offering an antidote to a homogenizing, one-world governance.
This work exemplifies how plural toxicities—infiltrating water, institutions, and imaginaries—necessitate equally plural antidotes. Such remedies cannot be engineered via centralized templates but must emerge from situated alliances among communities, rituals, and infrastructures. The state’s eventual acknowledgment of COPUDA’s pre-existing hydrosocial paradigm was therefore not a mere bureaucratic concession, but a forced recognition of a world predicated on companionship rather than instrumentalist logic. Their seemingly humble, collective practices ultimately composed a more habitable world than that offered by poisoned state designs
What followed was not only a triumph, but continuity, the slow work of caring for what had been reclaimed. Antidotes, in this sense, are not solutions but collective experiments in coexistence that turn depletion into interdependence. They teach that survival in damaged worlds (Tsing et al. 2017) demands alliances among humans, soils, aquifers, and more-than-humans. To write of these practices is to recognize that healing unfolds not through restoration but through a persistence that is shared, patient, and necessarily unfinished. The antidote neither seals wounds nor erases scars; it keeps them open as generative seams, turning damage into an aperture where relation can take root again (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Tsing 2015).
In the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, this openness has taken shape in the patient labor of the COPUDA, where the revocation of the 1967 decree did not conclude the struggle but redirected it toward the care of what had been restored. Wells are now cleaned collectively, infiltration ponds maintained through tequio, and the communal work synchronizes with the return of the rains. These acts do not heal by closure but by continuation—by keeping alive the relations that sustain the aquifer’s breath. Toxicity, however corrosive, is not final. Even poisoned terrains allow reinhabitation when care becomes a seasonal craft—less a deliverable than a practice through which humans, waters, soils, and other presences compose durable alignments. To sow water, in short, is to refuse the toxicity of the one-world state by affirming the persistence of many worlds. It is to practice, day after day, an ecology of healing.
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