Arraigo with the river: Cracks of care amidst water violences along the Arenal River, Colombia

This article examines how rural youth in the Arenal River, Colombia are forging modes of arraigo [rootedness] through care practices amidst overlapping violences. Through action-research with young people engaged in community-tourism, we explore how care for the river enacts an ethico-political practice that confronts what we term ‘water violences’: the accumulated effects of the modern/colonial order materialized in hydroextractivism, armed conflict, and mass tourism. Engaging with an interdisciplinary framework that draws on Latin American decolonial and feminist thought, alongside care scholarship and political ecology, we introduce the notion of ‘cracks of care’ to address how everyday practices and relationality open spaces of resistance and river-making. These cracks reveal emergent subjective formations among rural youth who articulate their connection to the river through living arraigo from a situated understanding of care. By learning to live with —rather than simply in— the river, youth are actively resignifying and recomposing their lifeways and their river-worlds, negotiating the present and afterlives of water violences while crafting alternative territorial imaginaries. Our analysis shows how cracks of care unfold as an entanglement of practices, emotions, memories, and stories, that expand existing understandings of river-worlds, care, violence, and rural youth subjectivities in contexts of multifarious crisis.