Battle of Women in Mexico’s Guanajuato

The battle of women in Mexico’s Guanajuato for access to drinking water. 

In the Independence Basin region, fossil water, rich in toxic minerals, sickens those forced to consume it, but the authorities, beholden to corporate interests, do nothing to prevent it. For years, building cisterns to collect rainwater has been an alternative for dozens of communities.

Carmen Guerrero, a beekeeper from the community of Ciénega de Juana Ruiz in Guanajuato, remembers how she suffered as a teenager when she looked in the mirror and saw her teeth stained with brown. “Here, most people have them like that; I wasn’t the only one,” she says. People thought it was normal, unaware that the cause was the water contaminated with arsenic and fluoride that they had been consuming for years.

Along with other women from her community, Carmen organized to build a ferrocement cistern to collect rainwater, with a capacity of 12,000 liters. She trusted that this decision would change the destiny of her children and grandchildren. No more decayed teeth to shame them and make them the object of ridicule. “That was my concern, my children, because I told my husband: ‘I don’t want them to suffer what I suffered.’” 

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