Floods, droughts and trauma Tracing the hydro-social scars of a Mexican city’s water crisis

Water is not a silent witness of the socionatural transformations of contemporary cities across geographies. It is a crucial participant in everyday urban practices, relationships and routines, leaving its mark in traces and stories that develop with our shared life. The role of water is evident in events that disrupt and reinforce normality, such as floods or droughts, which involve political decision-making (or apathy) and infrastructural capacities anchored in social and spatial inequalities.

These events have emotional repercussions, expose the fragilities of urban life and conjure the historical fractures of social relationships and landscapes.

Floods and droughts leave their imprints, like scars, on the intersections of urban water and society. When related to social inequality, trauma and injustice, the traces and stories of water become hydro-social scars. These scars reveal the consequences of change in the biographies, histories and geographies that make a city. They are present in the narrative and material gathering of expectations, memory, hurt and healing.

Monterrey’s water crisis

In the metropolitan zone of Monterrey, Mexico’s second-largest urban area, a pronounced water shortage became a reality in the first months of 2022. The combination of elevated domestic consumption, drought and the high consumption of water by industrial activity combined in a somewhat foreseeable situation. A water shortage in the city has triggered criticism of both the city’s mayor and the governor of Nuevo Leon state, and raised concerns about the water use of both households and industries.

An urban water crisis is an opportunity to reflect on the historical, material and personal dimensions of hydro-social scars in a city, and how they relate to our sociological imagination. Using sociological and multidisciplinary insights helps us to understand water not as a threat or source of anxiety on its own, but as something that is intertwined in our social relations and institutions. Water is actively involved in producing urban spaces through the relationships, meanings and practices that constitute everyday life.

Historical and material scars

Monterrey has been marked by the impact of colonisation and conflicts between social groups and landscapes. During the 1860s, North American settler expansion displaced indigenous nations into newly imposed international frontiers in north-east Mexico. A process of exclusion, war and violent confrontation against these nations led by the authorities of the region included the poisoning of water wells as a military tactic, as evidenced in the correspondence of Santiago Vidaurri, governor of Nuevo León and Coahuila between 1855 and 1864. Historical hydro-social scars reveal the legacy of colonialism and exclusion against native and displaced newcomers in the city.

The historical dimension of hydro-social scars is evident in the accumulated injustices and acts of destruction in and towards social groups and physical environments connected to the city. These injustices represent a historical debt around collective memory, grievances and a fragmented relationship with otherness. But the stories of water are complex and carry a combination of domination and resistance, conflict and encounter.

Recognising these complexities and injustices is fundamental to understanding the historical and material dimensions of hydro-social scars. In the context of Mexico City, scholars including historian Matthew Vitz have used environmental history and urban political ecology to examine the consequences of urban growth over a system of lakes.

The material dimension of hydro-social scars is also evident in how water flows have configured the urban landscapes of Monterrey. In the field of urban political ecology, authors such as Erik Swyngedouw have characterised cities as hybrids made of social and environmental elements, in which water flows reflect social power relations. Understanding cities as hybrids helps to spotlight the ideological and material implications of urbanisation. Doing so implies paying attention to the scarred assemblages that constitute urban landscapes which, as socio-natural combinations, are the result of historical processes.

The relationship of Monterrey with the Santa Catarina River, a now culverted stream that was fundamental for colonial settlements near the city centre, shows the material dimension of hydro-social scars. The culverting and drying of the Santa Catarina, combined with extractive rationality and real estate speculation, led to building over an almost waterless riverbed.

But when a hurricane hit the city in 2010, heavy rain caused unusual flooding. The river swept away what had been built over it, changing the usage of structures and streets, imposing new city dynamics and momentarily obstructing speculation. The city bears the hydro-social scars of flooding in local politics, development, mobilities and relationships with the urban landscape. Here as elsewhere, we see that extreme events can influence the meanings and stories of water and resonate in urban trajectories, as Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett’s edited collection exploring Houston’s relationship with flooding has documented.

Personal stories of water

But there is another, more personal dimension to the hydro-social scars linked to everyday life, as seen in the mundane, daily activities that have been affected by the ongoing water crisis in Monterrey, and discernible through theoretical insights around the everyday. These insights relate to the relational practices, emotions and meanings of urban water that Sophie Watson has traced using sociological and anthropological methods. They also relate to the experiences of water scarcity and the role of infrastructure, political decisions and citizenship practices facing it, as has been studied in São Paulo, Brazil by urban geographer Nate Millington.

When the government of Monterrey announced this year that the city’s households would have water for only six hours a day during June, July and August, the hottest months of the year, its residents became frustrated and anxious. A steady supply of water went from being a given to a source of uncertainty and improvisation, necessitating the remaking of routines to meet basic needs. It turned out that the personal dimension of hydro-social scars was inherently relational, and became visible in the everyday practices and interactions required to work through water scarcity crises.

A lack of information and a sense of urgency was experienced by Monterrey’s citizens as they adjusted to new living conditions, with no way of knowing how long they might last. The governor’s office announced strategies without maintaining or respecting them, demonstrating political incapacity and indifference. The governor cynically blamed city residents, the weather, and previous and neighbouring administrations.

Meanwhile, anxiety has spiked in the sectors of the city that have gone for days and weeks with no water, with residents having to rely on tanker trucks and improvised storage systems. Large queues formed around places that sold purified water as people sought something to drink at home. Creativity and solidarity emerged when the hardest-hit turned to family and friends to share, or used their trips to nearby cities to buy an extra gallon of water.

Destroying confidence

New routines and realities of water come with emotional and relational implications. Lack of confidence in infrastructure and institutions and a generalised sense of uncertainty produce hydro-social scars of a fragmented relationality with water and its distribution.

Not having water becomes a source of unsettlement, fear and continuous worrying about the future. In Monterrey, bodily and everyday engagements with water have come to the forefront of public discussion during the water shortage. When the connection to urban water becomes erratic, communications among people overflow with frustration. The personal dimensions of these hydro-social scars can be seen in the everyday fragilities of water, which translate into political scepticism, emotional rupture and vulnerability.

Such shortages make the role of water in the mundane practices of social reproduction and local livelihoods evident, and residents express their sense of injustice at government’s lack of accountability. But frustration and anxiety are not the only responses elicited by these new routines of water: humour, imagination and acts of solidarity have also spread in Monterrey’s crisis.

In situations such as this, conversation finds new themes and new relationships with neighbours, relatives and friends may arise. These streams of personal, emotional and relational responses, like the flows of water and their consequences, are unpredictable, and a valuable subject of sociological imagination and observation.

Water and healing relationships

Stories of water reveal the consequences of previous injustices and current political cynicism, which have left hydro-social scars on the history, materiality and personal lives of its inhabitants. In Monterrey, these are the scars of colonialism, extractive rationality and governmental apathy, manifesting in everyday experiences and injustices around water.

Reflecting on these scars is an opportunity to remember and challenge inequities, and to reimagine futures for the city. When a drought reveals the meaning of water for the fragile sustainment of life through our everyday routines, this reflection carries a sense of urgency.

Hydro-social scars leave an unerasable mark in the biographies and histories of the city. However, their meaning can be disputed and transformed. This dispute involves new relationships between humans and the non-human that contribute to future recovery while not erasing the past. Emerging opportunities for wellbeing require healing relationships characterised by restitution, political accountability, ethics and social justice.

The possibility for new trajectories and relationships is unrestricted and flowing, just like water, even when it runs underground to burst and flood everyday life in unexpected ways.