Kidnapped Water and Living Otherwise in a World of Drought, Fires, and Floods

This essay considers how the production of water as a resource that can be extracted and commodified is situated at the core of colonial capitalist economies. Water has become a volatile means to secure economic growth under conditions of accelerated aridification and scarcity. The focus of the analysis is the struggle of the United Front of Nahua Communities in Puebla, Mexico against the water bottling company Danone Bonafont. Like other Indigenous struggles, the significance of this case goes beyond water rights and environmental justice. Shifting the focus to relationships of water—the interactions between the human and non-human worlds, this paper demonstrates that conflicts over water, the life, and energy it represents reflects not only different value systems but also a disconnect about the place of humans in the wider world and in the current context of climate catastrophes, fires, and droughts. I develop a “confluence of plural bodies” approach to explore how “water as life” may offer us the language to envision alternative understandings of liberation.