I am in the pueblo of Casa Blanca, Jalisco, population 600, located seven kilometers north of Lake Chapala.
I am sitting on the patio of local activist Juanita Ramírez. On the floor next to me there’s a mountain of colorful ears of corn that need shelling.
Juanita is telling me about the Santiago River, one of Mexico’s biggest, which flows almost 650 meters north of “downtown” Casa Blanca.
“When I was a girl, we loved that river,” she relates, dreamy-eyed. “Everyone from the village went for a stroll there on Sundays. My father fished in it and that’s where I learned to swim. Yes, it’s true, I learned to swim in the Santiago River!”
Today Juanita is 71, a generation has passed, and the Santiago now has the dubious honor of being listed among Mexico’s top four most polluted waterways.
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