Mexico City

Danica Liongson (MLA + MDes ULE ‘20)

Thinking through soil from the role of a designer opens up questions of representation and negotiation, correlation and encounter. To begin, examining the wastewater agriculture soils that connect Mexico City and the Mezquital Valley evokes Bruno Latour’s writings on technical mediation. Agents have individual goals, but when they come together, they modify each other in such a way as to achieve a new outcome not previously attainable.[1] Built on former lakebeds, Mexico City’s key to survival as an urban enterprise is the removal of wastewater and stormwater. In parallel, the original soils of Mezquital Valley[2] are nutrient-poor and deficient in organic matter. Fertilizer is needed to engender the soils productive. Wastewater infrastructure mediates between the urban and rural to create an inextricable relationship between the two. Mexico City is able to drain runoff and sewage, while the Mezquital Valley receives free fertilizer on a daily basis with flows of wastewater rich in nutrients and organic matter. The more protein consumed in the diets of city-dwellers, the higher the nutrient content in the wastewater. Nitrogen and phosphorus  stimulate plant growth. In the Mezquital Valley, the productivity enables two to three additional growing cycles and increased yields—for example, up to 150% for maize. The relationship is so intertwined that, when Mexico City residents leave for vacation during Semana Santa, this initiates the dry season in the Mezquital Valley during what would normally be the rainy season[3]. Mexico City residents benefit from flood protection and public health standards, while the Mezquital Valley prospers as an agricultural region, growing 60% of the state’s crops[4]. Mexico City, one agent, is transformed by the Mezquital Valley, another agent, and vice versa.

In addition to mediation, the lens of the ‘encounter’ is critical for re-framing the wastewater agriculture soils. Vanessa Agard-Jones, drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot, discusses the connections between seemingly small objects and a larger world order. She describes how “thousands of small objects repeatedly verify the encounter [and they are] signs of encounter [and] elements of mediation.”[5] This is evident in the Atotonilco Wastewater Treatment Plant and its ties to international public health missions like the World Health Organization (WHO)[6]. On one hand, this mission strives to attain an equitable standard of health and living around the world. On the other hand, these standards can become hegemonic infrastructures that tend to be totalizing, operating the same way everywhere, regardless of context or location. The very standards that are striving to improve the health for those who live and work in the Mezquital Valley, are also posing a detriment to the cash flows and job security of farmers. Increasing treatment of water to international WHO standards will reduce the amount of organic matter in the wastewater and necessitate the purchase of additional fertilizer for food growers. On a local level, large landholders may have the capital to maintain their yields, but many farmers of smaller scale holdings will be unable to afford this without assistance[7]. As farmers are priced out of their livelihoods, this will have larger repercussions in the food chain, destabilizing the flow of goods into markets in Mexico City.

All in all, thinking through soil must complicate the relationship of cause and effect. Through the investigation of mediation and encounter, the soil becomes a medium to incorporate multiple viewpoints and lived experiences. Deploying representational tools and the language of design to untangle these entanglements is the first step, but will the designer truly become a mediator to a higher understanding or simply another encounter that reinforces an existing world view?

[1] Bruno Latour: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/54-TECHNIQUES-GB.pdf

[2] Jiménez Cisneros, Blanca E. “Unplanned Reuse of Wastewater for Human Consumption: The Tula Valley, Mexico.” In Water Reuse: An International Survey of Current Practice, Issues and Needs, edited by Blanca E. Jiménez Cisneros and Takashi Asano, xvi, 628 p. Scientific and Technical Report, no 20. London, UK: IWA Pub., 2008.

[3] Graham, Jonathan. “A Tale of Two Valleys: An Examination of the Hydrological Union of the Mezquital Valley and the Basin of Mexico.” In Mexico in Focus: Political, Environmental, and Social Issues, edited by José Galindo, 33–79. Nova Science Publishers, 2015.

[4]  Ibid

[5] Agard-Jones, Vanessa. “Bodies in the System.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17, no. 3 (42) (2013): 182–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378991.

[6] World Health Organization. “WHO Guidelines For The Safe Use Of Wastewater, Excreta And Greywater: Volume 2 Wastewater Use in Agriculture.” Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO), 2006.

[7] Graham 2015

Wire transfer, Nescafe, Cow, Maguey, Maize, Clay, Irrigation boots, Chiles, Fertilizer spreader, Bacteria, Basalt



Mezquital

Polly Sinclair (MLA I  ‘21)

The 2006 WHO guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta, and greywater self-declare that the guidelines will be useful to those dealing with issues and uses of wastewater “including environmental and public health scientists, educators, researchers, engineers, policy-makers, and those responsible for developing standards and regulations.” [1] The absence of farmers and food workers from the stated target audience of the WHO guidelines is telling in regards to the embedded power structures between public health and for-profit agriculture.  At first pass, it would seem that the story of the Mezquital Valley’s wastewater agricultural system is concerned with a mythical meeting between the urban dweller and farmer, both oppressed under the same food system. But the narrative in fact reveals more than geographically isolated bodies connected by hydrological infrastructure, capital flows, and trophic levels.Design potential lies in approaching a story of such complexity with expectations of paradox and hope for both corporeal and categorical elasticity. Such a research methodology is appropriate for soil and harkens to Donna Haraway’s argument for situated and embodied knowledges, although she warns that “To see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic, even if “we” “naturally” inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges.” [2]
     
          Subbasins of the Mezquital Valley. [3]
       
         
Irrigation Districts of the  Mezquital Valley [4]

The power dynamics at play are evidenced throughout the history of Mezquital’s agricultural landscape. On a national level, as part of a land reform strategy to redistribute land concentrated with a powerful colonial elite, the ejidos were granted legal status in 1917. Ejido members were given usufruct rights to land and water, both controlled by the Mexican government. [5] The morphing status of the ejidos over time reflects larger trends of privatization. Things came to a head in 1992, with the Mexian government’s NAFTA agenda evidenced in the “neoliberalization” of the countryside. [6] [wire transfer] Suddenly ejidos could be sold, used as collateral, or contract farmed. Outmigration tied to financial insecurity, and prolific contract farming between small ejidatarios and agroindustrial corporations have been the result. 1992 also marked the transfer of irrigation district control from the federal government to water user associations. [basalt] But despite the perceptual redistribution of power, the WUAs have tended to reinforce local political power of already dominant landowners. [7] Over time these changes flow through the artifacts of the food system and consumers’ bodies [nescafe].

The agricultural actors and products catalyze interactions between life, health, and the capital forces of the system. [cow] The semiarid landscapes of the Mezquital Valley used to only be cultivated seasonally and in rhythm with the needs and cultural traditions of indigenous communities. [maguey]  But the arrival of Mexico City’s wastewater enabled year-round production to feed market demands. [maize] The structure and materiality of the landscape itself, primarily composed of volcanic geology and clay-based soils, has been crucial to the system’s continued functionality over the past century. While the clay composition of the soil lessens heavy metal absorption and bioavailability of other dangerous byproducts of industry, there are limits to their buffering capacity. [clay] Industrial effluents, pharmaceuticals, and both harmful and beneficial bacteria all enter the dialog between wastewater, soil structure, plant roots, and the porous exchange between bodies and environment.
           
On the one hand is a consideration of labor, and of environmental injustice for those adversely affected by known pathogens associated with wastewater. [irrigation boots] Those working directly in flood and furrow irrigation systems are exposed to the highest risks. [chiles] It is these farmers and domestic workers whose health the new wastewater treatment plant at Atotolilco advertises itself as advocating for. But there is widespread and experiential-based distrust among Mezquital farmers that the billionaire-funded treatment plant will both sell them back clean water at a higher price, and force them to buy fertilizer that was free in the wastewater. [fertilizer spreader] Further complicating the issue is unquantifiable resilience to multigenerational oppressions experienced by those farming in the Mezquital. Some farmers assert that the wastewater does not in fact cause widespread disease within their communities

These tensions speak to Margaret Lock’s notion of the body’s “black-boxing” in which anthropologists abandoned the study of bodies to biologists. [bacteria] “As Lock notes, however, the cost of doing so is that we are now blind to how social and political processes produce biological difference, and by extension, how biomedical interventions may unwittingly perpetuate or enact further inequalities if they are not mindful of these local biologies.” [8] In the case of the Mezquital, global WHO health standards, economic measures of crop productivity and yield, imposed value systems that control capital, power, and health for those within the wastewater agriculture system, all represent an urgent need for deeper ethnographic engagement and decolonizing frameworks for working within these landscapes.

It should be within the purview of designers to investigate and learn from the power dynamics of knowledge bodies in the world, and how they feed back into the physical and the spatial. In her work between technoscience and race, scholar Kim Tallbear works from an indigenous perspective to investigate historically extractive and exploitative research methods of scientific knowledge. Her perspectival shift exemplifies the kind of subversion that design research practice can seek to engage with. [9] Vanessa Agard-Jones also offers tools to grapple with the spatial dimensions of power structures. She credits anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his ideas of the microlevel in which better understanding emerges in “a shift from looking at a small unit to looking from its place in the world” [10] The soils of the Mezquital Valley offer a place in which to begin.
       

[1] World Health Organization, “WHO Guidelines For The Safe Use Of Wastewater, Excreta And Greywater: Volume 4 Excreta and Greywater Use in Agriculture” (Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO), 2006).

[2] Donna Haraway. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99.

[3] CONAGUA. Estadísticas del Agua de la Región Hidrológico-Administrativa XIII; Conagua: Mexico City, Mexico, 2014.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Eric P. Perramond, “The Rise, Fall, and Reconfiguration of the Mexican Ejido*,” Geographical Review 98, no. 3 (July 1, 2008): 356–71, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2008.tb00306.x.

[6] Ibid, 359.

[7] Enrique Palacios, “Benefits and Second Generation Problems of Irrigation Management Transfer in Mexico,” in Case Studies in Participatory Irrigation Management, ed. David Groenfeldt and Mark Svendsen, WBI Learning Resources Series (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Institute, 2000).

[8] P. Sean Brotherton and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, “Revisiting Local Biology in the Era of Global Health,” Medical Anthropology 32, no. 4 (July 1, 2013): 287–90, https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2013.791290.

[9] Kim Tallbear. "Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry." Journal of Research Practice 10, no. 2 (2014): Journal of Research Practice, 01 July 2014, Vol.10(2). https://doaj.org/article/f526927816a94897a57db69dcfc4a34d

[10]  Vanessa Agard-Jones, “Bodies in the System,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17, no. 3 (42) (2013): 182–92, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378991.