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Todos Agua 2 is a celebration of water through music, art and poetry taking place over two weekends at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio.
It’s an expanded sequel to last year’s successful two-day festival.
Todos Agua 2 features some returning artists and musicians like the festival’s creative director Azul Barrientos and Chilean musician Julián Herreros Rivera.
TPR’s Norma Martinez previews Todos Agua 2 with Graciela Sánchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center; Annalisa Peace, executive director of the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance; and artist and activist, Nansi Guevara.
MARTINEZ: Graciela, can you talk about the expansion of this festival to five days, and why you chose to expand on that after a successful first year last year?
SANCHEZ: Norma, it's exactly that. Last year was quite a success, and it was over two days, and we had so many performers, poets, dancers, just on day one. And then we had a plática within that first day. And it was like, "Oh my God." We went on till 11 o'clock at night. And then the next day, we returned for an afternoon concert, which was a smaller gathering.
And so this year, we wanted to go to the river, the San Antonio River. So on Saturday [March 15], we went down to the river, and we had performers. It was beautiful. And we did ceremony, and at the end, people put down flowers to just honor our water and to respect it.
MARTINEZ: And so it continues now for two consecutive weekends. And can you tell us what is happening this Saturday and Sunday?
SANCHEZ: Well, this Saturday, the 22nd we have a concert with Azul Barrientos and Julián Herreros Rivera, who comes from Chile. And so both of them will put their energies together. And again, if you were lucky enough to go last year, you'll know their voices and understand how brilliant and exciting, and you're grounded in understanding what these issues are. And it's about water, but it's the larger environment of San Antonio and the nation and the world.
Then the following day, on Saturday, we expand and bring in our dear Carmen Tafolla, poet. She's not just the poet, but she's just really connected to all the issues that surround us. And she's always written poems about water as well. So we're excited to add her this week.
The following weekend, we have Julián do a very small workshop on song and music and singing. So he will limit this workshop to 30 people. So please go to our Eventbrite and sign on. I think there's still a few positions still available for anyone to come in and sign on. And that's a free workshop.
And then the following day, Saturday, March 29, we have this Plática Sobre Agua, Vida y Resistencia. We'll have Nansi Guevara. We'll have Annalisa Peace. And then we have a professor from UTSA, Marissa Muñoz, who will ask people to go back to the memories of water, first memories of water, and just kind of think about it on a day-to-day basis, what water means to everyone.
MARTINEZ: And I know that last year we had Maria Berriozábal here, who is a major water activist here in the San Antonio region, and she was one of the people who I think was very instrumental in getting Todos Agua off the ground. And can you tell us why it's still important to have these conversations about water?
SANCHEZ: Let's talk about climate change. Let's talk about how water has been seen as the new gold, because it's so precious, and it's being destroyed on a day-to-day basis. It's being contaminated. We don't have the rainfalls that we used to have in the past, or we do. It's excessive, and they're floods.
So, we have to be able to protect what we have. We have to think about it for ourselves, but we have to think about it for generations to come.
And I think in my work with Maria Berriozábal and other elders who taught me about water 30, 40 years ago, the struggle has been ongoing, and to protect what we have is critical. And sadly, developers, people who just want to build, build, build, aren't thinking about where they're building, what their actions are that will hurt, ultimately, human beings, but also the fauna and the flora that surround us.
MARTINEZ: Well, that's a great lead in into our next two guests. We have Annalisa Peace of the greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, and Nansi Guevara, activist. Annalisa, I think I'll talk with you first. Can you get maybe into some of the primary concerns — I know we can't get into all of them in the short time that we have — but what are some of the primary concerns for you and your organization that you think is important to focus on in Todos Agua 2?
PEACE: I guess Texas, because we have a large population growth, but we also have impacts of climate change that are affecting our water supply.
So what we're seeing, and we've been concerned about this for the past 20 years here at GEAA, is that we're seeing prolonged droughts and then flashier flooding, and we're in flash flood alley already for this our service area, which is Central Texas, so we're very concerned.
And we think that there are the strategies to actually manage water supplies. Of course, we're going to have to look at a different lifestyle, like we'll no longer be able to use half of our groundwater as we do in San Antonio to water lawns. But I think we can do this manageably, but it's going to take a lot of effort and a lot of planning.
MARTINEZ: And Nansi, I'm curious how you got into sort of water activism. You're an artist, you are an activist. And I know right now Space X is on the forefront of your focus, but I'm wondering, what was it that unlocked that sense of activism for you?
GUEVARA: Yes. So I was very influenced by growing up in Laredo, Texas. I spent the first 18 years of my life there, and now I've spent the last decade in Brownsville, Texas. And so I have spent a majority of my life living on the South Texas border.
I have always been deeply drawn to the Rio Grande when I learned that in Brownsville, near Brownsville, Texas, in Boca Chica, that's where the river released into the ocean, that was where the delta of the Rio Grande was located. And so when I went to visit for the first time, I just really felt that that space was a very important and magical and sacred space.
Soon after that, I started to learn about the original peoples of South Texas, the Estok Gna Somi Se’k Carrizo Comecrudo tribe. Estok Gna Somi Se’k see the Rio Grande as a source of life. And for so long, I and other people on the border have learned to fear the river and to see the river as a source of death and dying and danger.
As an artist and as just someone that is trying to understand her place and her context better, our border context, you just start kind of piecing everything together. And it's a long process of piecing together that our environmental justice struggle is also connected to immigration. It's connected to border militarization. It's connected to U.S. imperialism. It is also connected to a history of this idea of Manifest Destiny that eventually led to the border being drawn at the Rio Grande.
So as border people, we are raised, and we live with this idea of we are taught to fear the river. The original peoples of this land saw it as a source of life.
PEACE: I like to add a little context for San Antonio. Maria Berriozábal was also one of my mentors, starting 40 years ago. And I and others and Graciela, we have partnered on numerous occasions to try to steer San Antonio's water policy toward something that's actually common sense and equitable. And so we've had many, many battles.
And as Graciela mentioned, there's developers, there's people who have vested interests and things, but there's also a lot of people who will latch on to a stupid idea. Maybe they think about this maybe 10 minutes a week, or something like that.
And so it's been us on the policy side, people like Maria Berriozábal, myself, Graciela and many others who have actually been really active over the last 40 years to try to steer San Antonio towards rational water policy, which I think, with the exception of the Vista Ridge project, we really have with our public water supplier…
MARTINEZ: And the Vista Ridge Project is, very quickly, can you explain that for people who might not know?
PEACE: That's a pipeline where we're getting water from Burleson County…
SANCHEZ: Where we're taking water from Burleson County.
PEACE: And so what's happening, though, in that region with that aquifer is that a lot of water suppliers have contracted to take water from that area, and so it's an agricultural area, and so what we're seeing is that the farmers out there are having to drill their wells deeper. Their wells are going dry. It's not a sustainable water resource, and that's why we really oppose that.
Plus, I think there will be perhaps a trend. There's talk about the state taking over ground water supplies, which is not the case right now. Those water supplies are governed by local groundwater districts. But we would hate to see, actually a trend importing water from rural areas into urban areas, because that would, frankly, have a huge detrimental impact on our agricultural economy.
MARTINEZ: Well, this is something that we could talk about for a very long time, but I think it's a great preview for an event that is happening on Saturday, March 29. Again, it's the plática, the talk on Agua, Vida y Resistencia — water, life and resistance. It's a free talk. It's part of the Todos Agua 2 Festival, and Nansi Guevara will be a part of it as well Annalisa Peace and a few other guests. We hope that people can go to that free event at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center on March 29, I will be moderating that talk. But for now, I really would like to thank each of you, Nansi Guevara and Annalisa Peace and Graciela Sanchez, for taking the time to preview Todos Agua 2.
SANCHEZ: Thank you.
PEACE: Thank you.
