“Está Cabrón”: An End-of-Year Reflection on a World at the Crossroads

When I first meet the fisherman Gerardo Delgado, he is sitting in his boat, surrounded by pelicans, off the shore of Lake Toronto, in central south Chihuahua, Mexico. Perhaps the pelicans are waiting for Delgado to toss a fillet, but his catch is, yet again, meager. In the last couple of years, it’s been hard to make a living from fishing on the lake. I am with another fisherman, Alonso Montañes, and we approach Delgado on a motorboat.

Across the lake I can see Delgado’s town, El Toro, on top of a large embankment, about two stories high. Montañes tells me the embankment used to be the floor of the lake, which once reached the houses of El Toro. The lake—which is a reservoir created when the Boquilla Dam was constructed in 1916—is quickly receding. It is at 15 percent of its capacity, Montañes tells me. Never has it been so low.

Delgado is in a blue motorboat. I ask how many fish he has caught, and he shows me his plastic orange container with about five fillets scrunched in a corner. “This will probably earn me 60 pesos,” he tells me, adding that so far today, after about six hours, he has spent 350 pesos on gas. “So you are going to lose money?” I ask. “Every day,” he says.

Two years ago, Delgado tells me, El Toro’s community well went dry. Now to get water, they have to buy it from expensive “pipa” trucks that come from out of town. There used to be 40 families in El Toro. Now there are 17. Two of Delgado’s sisters are already in the United States.

It takes a bit for it to set in, but I finally realize that I am in a climate-change hot spot. I’m reminded of Marinduque, Philippines, which I visited in 2015. There, I saw water lapping into a destroyed house like it was a carcass. For me, in that moment, climate change went from abstract to raw and real. On Lake Toronto there is also this palpable sense of violence with the drought. Throughout the day, as we cruise the lake, Montañes tells me an “ecocide” is happening before our very eyes.

I am there because I am working on a book about climate change, water, and the border. And being there on the cusp of 2025 is significant for two reasons. One, of course, is the change in presidential power in the United States and the uncertainty that brings. But also 2025 is the year that Mexico, as stipulated by a 1944 treaty, is obligated to pay a water debt to the United States. Every five years Mexico has to pay the United States 1.75 million acre-feet of water, and in March it had supplied only 382,000. Farmers in Texas’s faraway Rio Grande Valley also depend on this reservoir’s water, which will flow north in the Rio Conchos and become the Rio Grande after Presidio, Texas. In other words, on Lake Toronto we are floating on the water that will become the U.S.-Mexico border. In May, Texas congresswoman Monica de la Cruz stood before the U.S. House and said, “We need to use every tool that we have available to force Mexico to abide by the treaty. We want our water. We demand our water!”

“Está cabrón,” another fisherman named Jesús Chávez tells me on the shores of Lake Toronto, a few miles from where Delgado was. He is not referring to de la Cruz’s words, nor to the United States’ demands. He is referring to having caught “nothing” after putting out his nets and traps the night before. At his feet are discarded watermelon rinds. He tried to grow the crop to supplement his income but couldn’t sell it for a good price. “Do you want a slice?” he asks me.

“Está cabrón,” he tells me as I eat the watermelon, meaning “it’s fucked up.” “Should be the title of your book.”

Later at dusk in the small town of Camargo, where I am staying, I get a coffee at a small stand in the town’s central plaza and sit on a wrought-iron bench. All around are holiday lights. All around are people out and about, kids on scooters and tricycles. I see Christmas trees decorated with large ornaments in the storefronts. December into the holidays is my favorite time of the year. Even with a dire forecast for next year, life always slows down, becomes more reflective, more present. There are indeed many things to worry about. But there is something about this plaza here in Mexico, where I can find a calm joy, at least for now.

As I sit, I read the late Irish poet John O’Donohue’s book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. I think about my day on the water as the poet contends that the violation of beauty is a fundamental element of today’s global crisis. “When we awaken to the call of beauty,” O’Donohue writes, “we become aware of new ways of being in the world.” Soon it is dusk, and the sky has clouds blazing across it, and there are even a few surprising raindrops. Across from me a group of women have gathered, two sitting on another wrought-iron bench, but several others have brought chairs from their homes as if the plaza were their living room. I come to understand, over the next few days, that this is a nightly ritual. Each time I see it, I think how much I love Mexico. And how imperative it is to think about things globally, not territorially, especially when it comes to environmental chaos.

Maybe 2025 could be the year to discard artificial borders—not necessarily the physical, militarized ones, which won’t be budging for a while, but the more easily movable ones, the psychological ones. Maybe 2025 could be a year that focuses on interconnectedness between people and peoples—like underground mycelia networks—rather than the brute territorial divisiveness that will surely emanate from Washington. I am, indeed, searching for new ways of being.

The next day I visit a rancho. It consists mainly of a pecan grove, but also has a drying alfalfa field. There, I meet with a farmer named Miguel. “What do you think about the incoming president?” he asks, referring, of course, to Donald Trump. At this point we have been talking for about 15 minutes. We are walking under the pecan trees on dry cracked soil near Camargo. The soil tells the story of 2024: it hasn’t rained. There isn’t enough water in the reservoir to irrigate this year, and Miguel knows this.

We are just a few miles away from the Boquilla Dam, which was commandeeredby the Mexican military in 2020. The military tried to open the valves to pay the United States with what was going to be irrigation water. What resulted was a serious water battle. Thousands of farmers converged around the dam and, after many clashes, forced the military out. The farmers shut down the valves. This time, when I ask if people thought the military would come for the water again, the response has been “what water?”

Miguel tells me he asked about Trump because before he came to this farm 15 years ago (he is an employee), he had lived in the United States for decades. He worked the corn harvests near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He picked grapes and chiles. If there is no water to irrigate here, Miguel tells me, there could be a lot of migration north. And if there is a mass deportation, he tells me, “there’s going to be a lot of problems.” He goes on, “I know because I worked the fields there. What are they going to do with the fields? The agriculture? Undocumented people are the ones who work there. Are they going to deport them here?”

And here, he says, “va a correr sangre antes de correr agua”: blood will flow before water does.

He asks what I think they should do, since I come here commissioned by the United States. I tell him I am not commissioned by the United States; I’m an independent journalist. I tell him I came here because the world seems to be at a crossroads, a crucial moment, and things like borders and water are at the center of that. I think about Alonso Montañes, on Lake Toronto, Gerardo Delgado showing me his meager catch, and Jesús Chávez saying “está cabrón.” I think about the women in the central plaza meeting up every night, even as the threat of water running out in Camargo looms for 2025. Would these people be the guides to a new way of being? I think that’s likely. That’s why I’m here, I tell Miguel. That’s why I’m talking to you, because you are the person who knows.

This originally appeared in The Border Chronicle.

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