Reporter’s Notebook: Walking to Mexico in a Dust Storm

Take a stroll through a dusty water crisis in the Texas-Chihuahua borderlands from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez to Boquilla and the Sierra Tarahumara.

The U.S.-Mexico border during the March 18 dust storm. (Photo by Todd Miller)

We are standing on the Prospect Street Bridge over Interstate 10 in El Paso, Texas, during a ferocious dust storm at around 2 p.m. on March 18. I am with geographer Joseph Nevins, who tries to fend off the dust barrage by wearing an N95 mask. You may already know Joe; he did a Q&A with The Border Chronicle last fall and has written two books on the border. Behind several lanes of cars and trucks, a massive wall of brown dust looms in the distance, perhaps a perfect image of the 21st century. Dust fills my eyes, coats my mouth, and clings to the screen of my phone. Against our better judgment, we are trying to walk to Mexico.

You might wonder why on earth we would do this in such a storm. Good question! We are attending a World Water Week conference running from March 17 to 22. This multidisciplinary conference is mainly held at the University of Texas at El Paso. But it also features binational discussions, and panels that often bring together scientists and artists for conversation and collaboration. At that moment, a panel titled “Advancing Transboundary Cooperation” was about to take place at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. This topic seemed crucial given the current state of U.S.-Mexico water “affairs.”

On March 20, that very week, the United States denied a Mexican request for water as punishment for not complying with a 1944 treaty, which mandates that Mexico deliver 350,000 acre-feet of water to the United States each year in five-year cycles. This year marks the end of the current cycle. Texas congresswoman Monica de la Cruz summed it up: “It is unacceptable and unfair to send our water resources to help Mexican farmers while they refuse to comply in sending us water for our South Texas farmers.” Discussions about who gets access to vital resources are often absent from U.S. national discourse, even when the border is such a deciding factor in who gets what. If this larger truth was a talking point at the Juárez panel, I decided, it was worth facing the dust storm.

I was attending the conference as part of a book project examining water and the border. After the conference, I planned to head into Chihuahua to study the drought and why Mexico has no water to give. I would visit the trickling headwaters of the Río Conchos, the largest river in the state of Chihuahua, which starts in the mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara and snakes through the state before becoming the Río Grande in Presidio, Texas. It’s a border river, and I will be sharing here some pictures and observations from the reporting trip. Many things I witnessed in the past two weeks reveal the critical and fragile water situation, but the dust storm stands out as the most vivid.

On the international boundary at the top of the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez on March 18. (Photo by Todd Miller)

Before Nevins and I began walking, we agreed we would turn back if conditions became too severe. But we trudged into the wind gusts until reaching the apex of the Stanton Street Bridge, which crosses into Juárez right at the international boundary line. Behind us, a U.S. flag and a Mexican flag flapped in the wind as the bridge vibrated beneath us. Below, the river was shallow, and on the U.S. side, short metal barriers held down by sandbags supported coiling razor wire in front of a concrete embankment. Behind that stood an imposing rust-colored border wall made of steel bollards, which included a gate topped with an additional layer of concertina wire. On previous trips, I had seen groups of people gather there to ask for asylum. Today, there was no one.

As we gazed over one of the most militarized borders on the planet, contemplating the traffic we had seen from the Prospect Street Bridge earlier (despite the storm), Nevins mused about what an archaeologist from 700 years in the future might think if they found the remnants of this civilization, seemingly on the verge of being buried in dust. What would they make of this madness?

View of the Rio Grande and the U.S. Mexico border on March 18 from the Stanton Street Bridge. (Photo by Todd Miller)...

The sky had a yellowish hue, resembling a jaundiced eye, backed by an omnipresent curtain of dust. The storm, of course, disregarded the border, battering both sides with equal ferocity. One article described the increasing dust storms in El Paso as a decade-long “surge” and attributed much of it to the lack of moisture linked to climate change. Water, again. When we got into a taxi in Juárez, our driver, Nancy, laughed loudly when I uttered one word after sitting down: “polvo,” dust. She laughed in a way that said, “Yep, that’s what’s happening, and we’re all in this together.” I had dust crusted on my forehead and in my mouth, which felt parched, and I realized I was extremely thirsty. The drought, which also ignored the border, was severe. The following week, hundreds of miles south, the mayor of Boquilla, Chihuahua, Javier Valtierrez, told me in an interview that the reservoir near his town—Lake Toronto, you might remember from a previous post in December, the largest reservoir in Chihuahua—was at 15 percent capacity, the bare minimum. The lake was drying up, and fishermen were struggling. There would be no irrigation water this year for farmers throughout the region. If conditions worsened, the mayor warned—and you could tell he didn’t want to say it—we could be facing an “ecocide.”

All that brown land would be the bottom of Lake Toronto if it were at 60 percent capacity. It’s now at 15 percent. (Photo by Todd Miller)

The drought in Chihuahua is pervasive and is categorized as severe, extreme, or exceptional depending on the municipality. In Boquilla, it was severe. In the Sierra Tarahumara, where the Río Conchos headwaters are located, it was exceptional, “the most serious level.” There, I walked with a Rarámuri man named Mario Quiroz Villalobos into the canyon by his home in the community of Gumisachi, where he mourned the Río Conchos, which appeared to be drying. “Do you think the river will die here,” he asked, “if it doesn’t rain?” I replied, “I don’t know. Do you think it will?” He responded, “Yes, yes.” He pointed across to a canyon where yellowish discoloration marred the trees, which were themselves dying in the drought; some had cracked and fallen to the ground. When I asked how he felt about this, he said he felt “tristeza,” deep sadness. He had grown up here with a flowing river.

Mario Quiroz Villalobos walks on the dry bed of the Río Conchos near its headwaters in the Sierra Tarahumara on March 26. (Photo by Todd Miller)

A cracked tree where we walked in the Sierra Tarahumara near the Río Conchos on March 26. (Photo by Todd Miller)

When Nancy dropped us off at the university entrance, the dust storm continued unabated. The gusts persisted. A friendly, wind-blown security guard emerged from a caseta, a small room just behind the entrance gate. He told us, much to our amusement and chagrin, that the event had been canceled. We paused, deliberating what to do. We had come a long way. “The storm,” he said. We nodded. He could tell we didn’t like the news. He told us a woman involved in the event was parked in the lot, and we could go talk to her. OK, why not? We trekked across the campus against the relentless wind. At one point, the gusts were so strong, I could barely move against their current. In central Chihuahua, Mayor Valtierrez would later tell me that he knew the United States was upset. There was an order, he told me and photographer Eduardo Talamantes, who I was traveling with, that if the reservoir reached 50 percent capacity, half of that had to be sent to the United States. He looked down at his desk, his eyes revealing uncertainty about the water conundrum. Even if they finally received rain, the water would immediately be taken.

In retrospect, maybe that’s why we were walking toward a distant car on the Juárez campus; we wanted, needed, to discuss alternatives, to “advance transboundary cooperation.” As we approached, two cars suddenly zoomed in and came to a rapid halt, as if taking part in a security operation. Two men jumped out and ran toward us. At first, I was startled; what was about to happen? But their faces were earnest. “Are you here for the water event?” one of them asked. “Yes,” we replied. “We hear it’s been canceled.” Several others appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. They were all would-be attendants of the canceled event. There we stood in the blowing dust storm, contemplating what to do. Finally, one of the guys said, “You want to talk about water, and we want to talk about water. Let’s talk about water.”

A mural in Creel, Chihuahua by Adán de la Parra. (Photo by Todd Miller)

In the past two weeks, I learned many things, both at the water conference and through discussions, models, performances, traveling, interviews, and contemplations. But this moment ranked as the most inspiring. We were literally planning an ad hoc, cross-border, binational event about an issue that concerned us all, despite the international boundary, all amid a dust storm. I couldn’t help but think of the book I was reading, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, in which author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes extensively about “gift economies” and the need to “back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized.” That sentiment felt particularly fitting for this moment, dust storm and all. Then security told us they would be closing up because of the storm and locking the gate. We had to leave, but not before acknowledging the necessity of such cross-border discussions. We also took a picture of the impromptu meeting.

Impromptu meeting at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez on March 18. (Photo by Todd Miller)