How Artists Rethink the Border's Water Crisis
Taking back the Rio Grande/Río Bravo as a river, not a border checkpoint.
Water infrastructures and the documents that oversee them carry heavy conceptual baggage. Reservoirs, dams, and canals symbolize colonial mastery over landscapes. They make grandiose promises of modernity. They are emblems of inequality and dispossession. In their current states of disrepair, they symbolize disinvestment; as climate change decreases snowpacks and rainfall, their emptiness exudes loss.
In the borderlands, water infrastructure takes on another layer: it becomes part of the border’s machinery of division and inequality. On April 28, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum and U.S. president Donald Trump announced that they had come to an agreement in an ongoing conflict over the shared waters of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. According to a 1944 treaty, Mexico must deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of the river’s water to the U.S. every five years. But the current five-year period, which ends in October, has coincided with extreme drought in much of northern Mexico. By May 10, Mexico had provided the U.S. with only about 600,000 acre-feet, leaving an impossible quantity of over 1 million to be delivered in five months.
Amid the Rio Grande/Río Bravo’s water crisis, three contemporary artists—Nicole Antebi, Ingrid Leyva, and Star Montana—examine the river’s infrastructure and governance from everyday, intimate perspectives. In doing so, they critique how the structures and documents put constraints on both water and people, and offer visions of new possibilities.
In Antebi and Leyva’s filmed performance Tratado de Amistad/Treaty of Friendship, the artists stand on a bank of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. The setting is bright and washed out, with thin clouds stretching across a blue sky and light-green shrubs lining the riverbanks.
The artists face one another. In their left hands, they hold a document that reads in large, hand-drawn lettering, TREATY OF FRIENDSHIP / TRATADO DE AMISTAD. Their right hands, meanwhile, engage in a handshake that the video’s loop makes infinite.
Leyva and Antebi have both spent years living, working, and collaborating in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua—conjoined cities traversed by the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. Their performance draws attention to an irony in the conflict between the United States and Mexico over the river’s waters: the document revolves around “friendship.”
Starting with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, the U.S. and Mexico started to make their contracts sentimental. The document’s official name is the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement. The 1944 water treaty on the Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande, meanwhile, opens by stating that it is “animated by the sincere spirit of cordiality and friendly cooperation which happily governs the relations” between the countries. That treaty mandated the construction of two dams on the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, and the authorities went so far as to name one “Amistad,” the Spanish word for “friendship.” At its dedication, U.S. president Richard Nixon said, “As we dedicate this dam today, we also rededicate ourselves to the furtherance of an ideal friendship.”
But this friendship doesn’t always seem present. Recently, the United States has chosen hostility. The 1944 treaty allows for exceptions to water deliveries in extreme situations like the current drought, if and when both countries agree to it. The US has shown no such sympathy. As The Border Chronicle reported on May 13, last year Texas senators suggested withholding congressional funds destined for Mexico as punishment for delayed water deliveries. In April 2025, Trump accused Mexico of “stealing” Texas farmers’ water. When he threatened to impose additional tariffs as a result, Sheinbaum announced that Mexico would immediately transfer water from its reserves—no matter the impact on Mexican farmers, whom the treaty is also supposed to serve.
The more Leyva and Antebi’s vigorous handshake continues—formally agreeing again and again on friendship—the more ridiculous it appears. The “friendship” insistently formalized by the binational treaties becomes clearly absurd. No real friendship needs to be signed into existence as a contract.
In the work’s humor, however, something human begins to replace the contractual friendship. The authentic bond between the collaborators is visible as they share in the joke of the performance. Even the river behind them seems somehow complicit: it can tell a real friendship when it sees one.
In Los Angeles, freeway bridges and interchanges define the landscape, the city’s ever-present emblems. Photographer Star Montana—who was born and raised in Boyle Heights, a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood in LA—trains her lens instead on water infrastructure. In Star in the Los Angeles River Tunnels, Montana stands in a black dress in ankle-deep water, framed by the shadows of a massive tunnel and backlit by the sky on the other end.
For many years, the Los Angeles River was a symbol of neglect. Most of its 51 miles are contained in a concrete channel that is often dry and a site for dumping. Though the river doesn’t cross the U.S.-Mexico border, it passes through the borders within the city of LA, suturing some of the world’s wealthiest, predominantly white neighborhoods to much poorer communities, many of them populated by immigrants of color and their families. Though it is now seeing a revival, the question of who will benefit remains open.
Montana makes herself part of the river’s landscape—a human-made landscape of black water and concrete walls, with just a postage stamp of green peeking through in the distance, framing Montana’s face and shoulders. Yet her portraits aren’t a simple commentary on environmental injustice. In another photograph in the series, Star within the Plants in LA River, the greenery takes over. She appears in the same black dress, now submerged in thigh-high water. Surrounding her are impressive patches of green, seemingly alligator weed and giant reed—two invasive species whose proliferation in the LA River has concerned ecologists. Yet Montana doesn’t cast any judgment on them as weeds; instead, she allows them to welcome her, as one of their own, into the home they have made in the concrete-channeled river.
Montana also brings this sensibility to the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. In Rio Grande at Rio Bravo, NM, she stands again in thigh-high water in a black dress. The palette of the water, soil, and plants is the same as that of Leyva and Antebi’s handshake loop, but the orientation has been rotated: instead of stretching horizontally across the image, the river narrows into the distance.
Though there’s no dam or canal wall visible, the river is recognizable as a manipulated landscape, channelized to flow straight and deep. Montana stands at the center of this channel, her back to the camera, looking upstream. With her hair fallen loosely at her shoulders and her arms hanging by her side, she again seems to take on the posture of a plant—rooted in the riverbed, languidly allowing the water to push and shift her with its pulse.
Here, the river does not only witness and offer space for human friendship—it welcomes the human visitor into companionship. As at the LA River, the river’s waters overtake the infrastructure that has tried to control them, turning the channel into a foundation to create a lush home.
Cristina Rivera Garza writes in the book Autobiografía del Algodón,
Standing before the irrigation canals, we visitors kicked off our shoes and threw ourselves headfirst into the water, without the slightest suspicion that every one of our voracious, gleeful strokes was sinking into the currents of the Río Bravo. ... How were we supposed to have the slightest idea that the waters where we were splashing around had been the material of diplomatic strife between Mexico and the United States?
Leyva, Antebi, and Montana’s work seeks to recover the innocence that Rivera Garza recalls of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo in the 1970s—a river being a river instead of acting the part of a border. Yet to do so, the artists all went upriver, to the river’s New Mexico stretches. At the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s clear that the river’s waters are contested because of the infrastructure of militarization: steel bollards, concertina wire, and surveillance towers. To approach and enter the river as it flows, you have to go upstream.
Perhaps it’s not such a stretch to translate that freedom to the river’s border segment, too. In an essay in the Texas Observer, Antebi wrote of jumping into the river with Leyva and other friends and collaborators: “This river, which has been almost entirely recast as a border checkpoint, could and does still exist as a place of recreation and pleasure.” Antebi, Leyva, and Montana’s work assures us that releasing waters from strict, coercive governance in turn allows for deepened connections between the humans that depend on them—and between humans and our plant, mineral, and liquid counterparts.
Y'all have put me on to the water crisis down there. I really wasn't paying attention to this until I started reading about it in TBC.
Thanks for this inspiring piece. I've been working on a poem about the river as a river and not a border for a while, and it's wonderful to see the work being done that delivers that message.