Hydrofeminist Life Histories in the Aconcagua River Basin: Women’s Struggles Against Coloniality of Water

Abstract

This article examines the struggles for water justice led by women in the Aconcagua River Basin (Valparaíso, Chile) through a hydrofeminist perspective. Chile’s water crisis, rooted in a colonial extractivist model and exacerbated by neoliberal policies of water privatization, reflects a deeper crisis of socio-environmental injustice. Rather than understanding water merely as a resource, this research adopts a relational epistemology that conceives water as a living entity shaped by and shaping social, cultural, and ecological relations. Drawing on life-history interviews and the construction of a hydrofeminist cartography with women river defenders, this article explores how gendered and racialized bodies experience the crisis, resist extractive practices, and articulate alternative modes of co-existence with water. The hydrofeminist framework offers critical insights into the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and environmental degradation, emphasizing how women’s embodied experiences are central to envisioning new water governance paradigms. This study reveals how women’s affective, spiritual, and territorial ties to water foster strategies of resilience, recovery, and re-existence that challenge the dominant extractivist logics. By centering these hydrofeminist life histories, this article contributes to broader debates on environmental justice, decolonial feminisms, and the urgent need to rethink human–water relationships within the current climate crisis.

1. Introduction

The water crisis in Chile, exacerbated by neoliberal policies and the privatization of water, has manifested itself acutely in recent decades, and the lack of adequate regulations has allowed water to become a highly coveted and unequally distributed resource. The discussion around management, use, and consumption has been broad and deep, as it is understood that the water crisis not only responds to a natural phenomenon, but has emerged as a consequence of a marked commodification of the element, affecting communities and ecosystems (Schiappacasse et al. 2024; Bolados et al. 2018).

The Chilean water rights system encourages the accumulation of water ownership, increasing the vulnerability of rural communities and small-scale farmers while also threatening local ecosystems and biodiversity. From the 1981 Water Code, forcibly implemented during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the productive use of water was prioritized, which has generated a depletion of watersheds. This legal framework translates into a water management model characterized by the allocation of Water Use Rights (DAA), which established the delivery of water in liters per second without considering the current mega-drought scenario. Thus, this legal framework, although it considers water as a national good for public use, privatizes it by allowing its sale and transfer as just another resource in the market (Budds 2020).

This system has favored the accumulation of water rights in the hands of large national and international business conglomerates, leaving farming communities and indigenous peoples in a notoriously precarious situation. The expansion of large-scale agriculture and forestry, mainly for export, has been a key factor in the overexploitation of so-called water resources. This ecologically harmful expansion has strained aquifers and ecosystems, accelerating desertification in many areas. The lack of effective and equitable water management threatens the long-term sustainability of economic practices and the survival of entire communities. From this arises a tension between this legal framework and the role of Rural Drinking Water Associations (APR), now institutionally referred to as Rural Sanitation Services (SSR) since the 2022 reform. APR aim to expand access to drinking water, especially in rural areas, and are of eminently peasant origin, linked to family agriculture and human consumption (Schuster and Tapia Valencia 2017). In addition, APR offer an alternative to privatized water services, based on the principles of solidarity and self-management (Boso et al. 2024). The water reform prioritized human consumption, but does not define how that translates into SSR rights. Several authors consider that APR organizations represent an alternative to the processes of monopolization and commodification of drinking water services, as they are usually governed by principles of solidarity and self-management (Boso et al. 2024, p. 300). In addition, they can generate the strengthening of management capacities in the territory and a collective appropriation of the resource, which are basic elements of community governance (Nicolas-Artero 2016).

The crisis is not only a reflection of mercantile policies, but also of an unsustainable development model that privileges exploitation and exportation over local sustainability. As a consequence of this scenario, water conflicts have intensified in recent decades, reflecting a growing social discontent with these policies (Budds 2009). Thus, the water crisis in Chile is presented not only as a water management problem, but also as an opportunity to rethink and redesign public policies in relation to essential natural common goods. In response to this challenge, some experts and activists have proposed the adoption of a more collaborative and participatory approach to water management that includes all sectors of society that are involved. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of the neoliberal capitalist model, promoting a vision of sustainability that integrates cultural, economic, social, and environmental considerations in the management of the water commons. Enabling dialogic exchanges that advance environmental resilience involves moving beyond the utilitarian framing of water as a resource and embracing its status as a relational subject across historical contexts. From the perspective of public policies, the recognition of water rights at the local level and autonomy in its management is required, in addition to proposing conceptual frameworks for the interpretation of socioecological processes, which should involve communities and their local knowledge and practices.

2. Decolonial Feminist and Hydrofeminist Perspectives

The decolonial feminist perspective emerges as a radical critique of the theoretical frameworks of Western hegemonic feminism, pointing out its inability to capture the multiple forms of oppression experienced by women and dissidents of the global South, especially those crossed by racism, coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge (Lugones 2008; Curiel 2009; Ibarra 2024). Coloniality has also crossed feminisms—even hegemonic feminism in Latin America—which makes women from the “Third World” (or the South) be thought of as objects (or victims) and not as subjects of their own history and their resistances, giving way to a discursive colonization (Mohanty 2008; Curiel 2009; Espinosa 2014). From this approach, patriarchy is not understood as an isolated system, but in interrelation with racial capitalism and colonialism. This view has been key to making visible the epistemic, material, and symbolic violence that shapes the lives of racialized women in contexts of dispossession, extractivism, and denial of rights.

In the specific field of socio-environmental struggles, from this approach water is recognized not as a resource, but as a relational subject that is part of a shared web of life. The hydrofeminist approach (Neimanis 2017) allows reconfiguring the human–nature relationship from a logic of reciprocity and co-constitution, recognizing that, in a context of dispossession and devastation, feminized and racialized bodies become extensions of exploitable territories. This vision is supported by the notion of body-territory, understood as a vital unit affected by multiple violences, but also capable of resistance and re-existence (Cabnal 2017. Within this framework, the decolonial hydrofeminist approach proposes a critique of the neoliberal development model, denouncing the commodification of water and vindicating the situated knowledge of women who inhabit watersheds, rivers, and estuaries. Through the concept of “subordinated waters” (Ibarra 2024), it shows how water policies in Chile—and in Latin America in general—reproduce colonial and capitalist hierarchies, exacerbating inequality and depriving communities of the right to water.

3. Research Question and Objectives

The Chilean State adheres to a development paradigm in which water management is regulated by the market, considering the common good of water as a “natural resource” that is administered under the logic of private property (Aigó et al. 2020). This way of relating to water is a problematic issue that is being questioned by socio-environmental organizations and from a hydrofeminist perspective.

Treating water as something quantifiable and instrumentalized not only carries the risk of its exploitation and deterioration, but also hides a management paradigm that is ultimately unfeasible and does not respond to the specific challenges of water, in specific places and at specific times. Abstraction is therefore another problem linked to issues of quantification, instrumentalization, anthropocentrism and nature/culture divide

(Neimanis 2014).

While companies regard water as capital, communities relate to it as a living entity essential to both emotional connection and survival: “Affect proceeds directly from the body, and indeed from between bodies, without the interference or limitations of consciousness, or representation” (Domínguez and Lara 2014, p. 9). Affect and feeling are part of the epistemologies of the South and shape an attempt to create ways of knowing and doing beyond thinking and dogmas substantial to Western philosophies (Verea and Zaragocin 2017, p. 18). Decolonial feminisms, ecofeminisms, and hydrofeminisms emphasize their focus on this affective relationship and on feeling as their own ways to go beyond materialist logics. The objective of this article is, therefore, to analyze from a hydrofeminist and decolonial perspective the struggles and water experiences under the following question: how does the hydrofeminist and decolonial perspective contribute to the analysis of the links between women and the Aconcagua River? This article invites a relational approach that understands connections with water as embodied in the life histories of individuals, communities, and the diverse territories they inhabit.

4. Research Area

The research territory is the Aconcagua River basin as a hydrosocial territory (Damonte Valencia 2015), which considers the interrelation between nature and culture and its concrete forms of territorialization through water management (Linton and Budds 2014). The hydrosocial territory supplied by the Aconcagua River is located in the Valparaíso Region (central Chile), and includes the area from the Andes Mountains, through the Juncal and Blanco Rivers, to its mouth at the beach in the municipality of Concón. The main economic activities of this territory are agriculture, agroexport, commerce, and mining. The normal development of these activities and the provision of drinking water are affected by the increasing drought in the Aconcagua River basin (Figure 1).

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the basin has been divided into four sections, which gave rise to the surveillance boards in charge of distributing water according to legally constituted water rights. This basin is the last in the region with available surface water, after the other two rivers (La Ligua and Petorca) were declared depleted in the 1990s and in the early 2000s. From 2008 to date, the General Water Directorate (DGA), which is the government agency in charge of protecting and conserving the country’s groundwater, has issued more than ten declarations of “water scarcity”. This shows the acute crisis of water management in the territory.

5. Research Methodologies

As Guiomar Rovira says in the book Beyond Feminism (2014), “In a way, decolonial feminism seeks to bring to light precisely plural histories: the other matrices of other forms of knowledge hidden and kept alive in the female sphere and among indigenous peoples, other life choices, other worldviews that can give us elements to think about and fight for.” (Rovira 2014, p. 300). Feminism has put the body at the center, which is a situated body, with its history and its pains. This is one of the great truths through which we begin to build the common. Situated knowledge can express in its narratives personal as well as collective sufferings. These can be recognized in the micro-political everyday life that is, at the same time, a product of the global order of power. In this research, I seek to explore feminist narratives concerned with the relationship between ecology, health, and feminism, which are linked to practices of care, resistance, food sovereignty, and good living.

Ten in-depth interviews were conducted between September and November of 2024 with local women and inhabitants of each zone of the basin: the source of the river in the upper pre-mountain range zone (Putaendo, Los Guzmanes, Los Patos, Los Andes, San Esteban), the inland zone (Llay Llay, Limache, Catemu, Quillota), and the mouth of the river (Concón). These women, from 35 to 60 years old, are part of socio-environmental organizations, in defense of both the river in some of its phases, as well as the wetland. Two of them (María and Sonia) are leaders of APR associations. I conducted all the interviews in Spanish and translated the transcripts into English for the material cited. To preserve the anonymity of the participants, pseudonyms have been used in this article.

Through these interviews, I conducted a narrative analysis to interpretively reconstruct the trajectories, histories, and biographies of women, in order to address key issues related to water extractivism and dispossession. The methodology of life histories is based on the understanding of social subjects as bearers of situated knowledge, whose biographical experiences allow access to the meanings they construct about their social world. This technique allows an in-depth look at individual trajectories, which in turn are anchored in broader social structures (Bertaux 1981). Moreover, from a feminist perspective, life histories are a political and epistemological tool: they make visible voices that have been historically silenced, recover embodied knowledge, and allow us to think about power structures from lived experience (DeVault 1999; Stanley and Wise 1993). As bell hooks (2000) points out, the narration of personal experiences is a form of resistance to dominant discourses. From a decolonial perspective, life histories allow us to challenge hegemonic ways of producing knowledge, giving value to other ways of narrating, remembering, and understanding the world. These methodologies open space for “other knowledge” and plural forms of constructing truth from the margins (Walsh 2010). In addition, the affective and relational dimensions of life histories allow working not only on what is said, but also focusing on emotions, silences, and corporealities, which is especially relevant in research on bodies, gender, territory, and water (Jackson and Mazzei 2012).

The hydrofeminist perspective, which understands us as bodies of water, points out that we are intertwined with the waters of the planet through a continuous flow that connects us beyond human borders. From there, as Camila Stipo (2024) points out, “Thinking of ourselves as bodies of water allows us to generate local cartographies in which water actively interferes, questioning the hierarchical division between nature and culture” (Stipo 2024, p. 379). Feminist cartographies recognize how space and identities are co-implicated and co-constituted, where diversity and social inequality are systematically reproduced (Gill 2007). Acknowledging this arbitrariness, they reappropriate the tool with a critical perspective and reproduce it from the margins of geography, retaking narratives of the territories and of those involved in the experience of constructing space. This re-signification involves shifting the technical focus to a relational one, where experience, local knowledge, and life trajectories take center stage. Emotions thus become fundamental in the process of constructing geo-narratives (Kwan and Ding 2008), recovering narrative materials such as oral histories, life histories, and biographies. For this study, collective mapping was carried out as a means of socializing knowledge and practices, providing an impetus for collective participation and the exchange of experiences. The objective was to generate a hydrofeminist textile cartography (Figure 2) as a testimonial archive, linking women’s memory to the Aconcagua River, along its entire course from the mountains to the sea. With the participation of fourteen women inhabitants of the basin (not the same ones who were interviewed before), the aim was to recognize embroidery as a practice that links women to their history, as well as to learn various textile techniques, such as embroidery, burlap, and other forms of textile printing.

6. Results

6.1. Intersectionality of Violence

Throughout the conversations, both personal and collective reflections gave rise to the emergence of relevant key issues: the oppression and precariousness in territories with extractivist activities are intensified in the bodies of women, girls, and dissidents. Since there is a repatriarcalization of space through the feminization of certain jobs, especially in seasonal agribusiness, there is an increase in the care of people due to illnesses and of territories due to pollution and water scarcity, intertwining extractivism and patriarchy (Fernández 2024, p. 194).

The precarization and exploitation of bodies generates intersectional violence, because women suffer not only because of their gender, but also because they experience other forms of oppression in their bodies. Intersectionality, as conceptualized by Kimberly Crenshaw (1989), is a paradigm that reveals how gender, race, and other axes of differentiation interact within social practices, institutions, and cultural ideologies. Rather than viewing these variables as isolated or additive forms of privilege or discrimination, this framework highlights their mutually constitutive and hierarchical relationships (Kerner 2009). The additive logic or juxtaposition of oppressions does not reflect a complete constitutive reality, but rather exalts the fragmentation of identities (Ibarra 2023). Therefore, it is understood that the subaltern women of the system are victims for having in their bodies an intertwining of oppressed identities. Therefore, Rita Segato (2015) argues that intersectionality is generated in a historical process that is coloniality, so it should not be detached from it. María, an elderly woman who has spent her entire life in a rural area of the basin and actively participated in various social organizations, recounts the circumstances that compelled her family—long rooted in agricultural traditions—to abandon farming:

“Peasants, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, all have been engaged in agriculture. While, well, I think my dad stopped planting in 2012, more or less, planting the land. Because from then on I no longer had any water, and I was no longer old enough to go out to take care of the water, because we have the irrigation canal, which was intervened due to the destruction of aggregates, but then you had to wake up at night to be able to water the land for a couple of hours, so it was no longer a life for anyone, especially for an older adult, to have to wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning to be able to water.”

(María, Limache, 2024)

Economic precariousness is intertwined with rural social precariousness. Growing up in an impoverished village with limited resources implied, in itself, a form of daily violence: As María also said, remembering her childhood: “there was a lack of bread, but because it rained for eight days… we were isolated by floods”. This episode illustrates how the absence of infrastructure—such as bridges and roads—along with limited resources, reinforces both symbolic and emotional forms of violence. Or, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2018) puts it, a historical logic operates in which the rural periphery is sacrificed for urban “progress”, imposing a regime of accumulation that marginalizes peasant communities.

The intersectionality of oppressions appears in their lives as women, and as peasant and rural women. It is not possible to understand violence against women without situating it in the context of class and racial hierarchy, neoliberalism, and contemporary militarization: these factors form the background of the “pedagogy of cruelty” (Segato 2003). Under the development model, nature has been a territory exposed to capitalist violence, as well as a body feminized and subordinated by other axes of oppression. The territorial paradigm of politics is complemented by the intersectional approach, because it accounts for the intersection of factors of subordination and exploitation. “The centrality of thinking in terms of body-territory is also affirmed in the sense that the territory assumes characteristics of the female body, it is feminized at the moment of conquest, occupation, dispossession, functionalization” (Marchese 2019, p. 34). Maristella Svampa speaks of the “eco-territorial turn” to speak of the crossing and articulation between the communitarian matrix and environmentalist language (Svampa 2010, p. 22), which is also linked to the feminization of political struggles and the environmentalization of social struggles. The struggles for the commons are intersectional; they go beyond narrow strategies that consider unidirectional struggles; “green capitalism” or “white feminism” are not advances that distribute rights and benefits to all territories or to all women or dissidents. They are new forms of colonization to legitimate demands from the territories that focus on specific demands in historical struggles (Ibarra 2024).

It is also possible to analyze what happens in ecological terms from a feminist perspective, understanding and putting into perspective the way in which territories have been subjected and exploited, as well as women’s bodies (Espinal and Azcona 2020; Herrero 2021). The accounts of the women interviewed show how various forms of oppression intersect in their daily lives, illustrating the concept of intersectionality of violence. Colonial logic is reproduced in the family sphere, causing domination and aggression to be instilled in domestic life. In the case of Sandra, this domination took the form of extreme demands: “And then my mother said: ‘if she doesn’t want to study anymore, she’s going to start working’ (…) So I went out to wash, I don’t know how I would leave the clothes when I was 10, 12 years old. To cut vegetables, peel peaches, whatever they wanted me to do” (Sandra, Putaendo, 2024). The early lives of many women in rural territories are marked by a lack of institutional protection—what Segato (2018) refers to as a “situation of intemperance”—in which care structures are absent or suspended. Gender-based violence, therefore, cannot be treated as an isolated phenomenon, detached from these broader conditions of abandonment. In this scenario, the institutionality that should have protected women—either their school, or the State, or the father himself, absent in their story—failed in its functions, perpetuating a structural violence. This is related to the lack of protection enjoyed by women defenders of territories. Margarita, who has received several threats due to her socio-environmental activism, explains: “It is not easy to be involved in this issue. I would like you to express it in this interview: you feel fear. When you start to see that there is no one on your side, there is no one from the State through its institutions, not the police, no SAG, no councilors, no mayor, no governor, no canal owners, all against you, you feel fear. You question your safety. Yours and also that of your family” (Margarita, Los Andes, 2024). These kinds of experiences of solitude and dispossession demonstrate the importance of collective organizing among women. Francisca illustrates this point by explaining the shared experiences they identify as being shaped by structural conditions.

“It was necessary for us to talk and find out what had motivated us and why we believed that we were the ones raising these issues and activating ourselves. Because we are all very powerful, so we said: yes, home care, which we have always had and which has also been for us as feminist women a whole issue, because the woman who stays at home is usually not valued for her work of upbringing, caring for parents, grandparents and everything. So, why do we have to take care of the land? In other words, how does this happen? We wanted to begin to unravel this among ourselves. We had all been motivated by essential issues such as water, not having water. Who is most affected by climate change? Women. Then we began to see that in all socio-environmental conflicts, the first to suffer are women.”

(Francisca, Concón, 2024)

This testimony reflects the notion of commonality shared by women who suffer processes of dispossession, devastation, and contamination of their personal and collective water sources, and of themselves. Gathering and conversing with one another constitutes an emancipatory process that promotes spaces of cohesion and mutual support.

Western thought has generated binary conceptual divisions that establish hierarchies: culture/nature, mind/body, reason/affects, concrete/abstract, public/private, man/woman. Around these dichotomous structures, interrelationships have been attributed that go hand in hand between biological evolution and sociocultural behavior. The “inferior” order of women has been attributed to the fact that they are identified with nature, something with little value in contrast to culture (Ortner 1981). Female subordination is a social construction that has been determined as an established order; gender differences are perpetuated and become accepted as something “natural” that responds to a colonial order.

6.2. Environmental and Cosmogonic Coloniality

Throughout the interviews and conversations held during the creation of the hydrofeminist cartography, key elements of analysis could be identified that were essential to understanding the epistemological differences between diverse rationalities. The slogan of feminists and women of native peoples who put life at the center of their lives clashes with the Western paradigm. In times of capitalism, as Juan Carlos Skewes (2019) calls it, private property is the fiction that most deeply fractures both the landscape and the human condition (Marx 2014 in Skewes 2019, p. 34). Agribusiness has generated profound damage, as stated by one of the interlocutors: “They have peeled a lot of hills to put avocado plantations and we know that avocados consume a lot of water. So, the water tables began to drop, some wells began to hang, there began to be less water in the canals” (Patricia, Llay Llay, September 2024). In addition, the benefits and profits generated by this industry remain in the hands of large entrepreneurs and it is the small farmers who see their production deteriorate, affecting local food sovereignty and family economies. As Gabriela, an inhabitant of the upper zone of the watershed, says, “What we have here is agroexport. What is grown here goes abroad, a little is left for here, but it has nothing to do with basic foodstuffs for your diet” (Gisela, San Esteban, 2024). Or, as Claudia, from the same ecological and territorial organization as Gisela, says:

“There were fields where sources of employment were generated through tomatoes, potatoes, different basic food products, but today they are no longer seen. It is very lost and also due to the lack of water. Many times, when you ask them, why did they stop growing crops? They tell you ‘Because we don’t have water’. Or it is that the water is very concentrated in the big businessmen, or it is all going to avocados. So, this has also led to the loss of the agricultural identity here in the valley.”

(Claudia, San Esteban, 2024)

Francisca expresses the same idea from her socio-environmental work protecting the wetland at the mouth of the river (Figure 3):

“The defense of the wetland is more about water and the ecosystem, which is the most relevant. In other words, we don’t like to talk about natural resources or ecosystem services, we don’t like to say that because it is very anthropocentric. What we want to protect is the wetland that gives life to all of us. In other words, water gives life to all of us, not only to humans, but to all those who live there: flora, fauna, fungus. The important thing is to conserve it and we see that it is totally abandoned. A mouth is very important in a river, in a basin, and it is the most unprotected.”

(Francisca, Concón, 2024)

Capital establishes its parameters: which waters and lands are subordinate. This is how “sacrifice zones” are erected, where those least responsible for the socioecological crisis suffer the worst consequences. The capacities to adapt and cope with the consequences are determined by factors such as race, class, and gender. The less capital one has, the more vulnerable one is. Structural differences are based on differences generated by coloniality: they are patriarchal, racist, and anthropocentric. Environmental conflict is also colonial. The regeneration of life finds in the idea of development and private property its main limitations, and where this is best reflected is in the concession policies in Chile of both water and subsoil rights (Skewes 2019, p. 34). This way of conceiving the elements of nature is opposed to the recognition of territories in their multidimensionality, which hinders the dialogue between two paradigms in notorious contradiction (Aigó et al. 2020. )Modernization increases water stress. But there are organizations like Sandra’s that organize and resist because they recognize the importance of this vital element:

“We have let ourselves be carried away by the industrialized, because now there is money. But, why do we have to defend water? Because water is vital, because without water there is no life. So, I do not understand why these people, with their ambition, do not have in their heads that water is a priority for human beings. Priority for human beings, not for mining or any other activity, even before the plants, we are human beings.”

(Sandra, Putaendo, 2024)

The extractivist economic model provokes a fruitless relationship between the parties, establishing hierarchies from a multiculturalist racism (Richards 2016) and marking a clear limit for dialogue. This is how the colonial state relates to the population, generating displacement, land expropriation, structural racism, and extractivism: “Water is only seen as a resource then it is only seen as something that serves us, but the water that is here, serves us to mitigate everything that climate change can happen. They are water sinks, they purify, so all this relevance is very important for life in Concón” (Francisca, Concón, 2024). Water bodies are central to the sustainability of life.

Under the lens of cosmogonic coloniality (Walsh 2009), the anthropocentric conception of the world is one in which the binary differentiation between human beings and nature is understood, where the former is above the latter. It involves the primacy of a thought that categorizes as non-modern or “primitive” the communities that possess a worldview that connects with the earth, plants, and spirituality as living beings, that rationality that connects with other worlds (Ibarra 2024). It is a thought that “seeks to undermine the worldviews, philosophies, religiosities, principles and systems of life, that is, the civilizational continuity of indigenous communities and those of the African diaspora” (Op. Cit, p. 3). This type of coloniality directly affects peoples of the global South: Afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, and peasants who are classified as the subalterns of binary hierarchies, constituting the category of primitive, irrational, magical/mythical thinking in pursuit of the scientific and modern belonging to the hegemonic perspective of being and knowledge (Quijano 2000; Ibarra 2024).

From the Western point of view, nature is not recognized as having an ontological imprint and relevance because it possesses a different logic from that of human beings. The perspective that conceives it as utilitarian resources available to people to reproduce their anthropocentric system of needs has prevailed. There is a mismatch between the external intervention models and local practices (Aigó et al. 2020), a difference in perspectives or, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) calls it, the prevalence of equivocal relationships.

6.3. Links Between Water Bodies

The life-history methodology has established itself as a key tool in the study of water conflicts because it makes visible the situated and embodied experiences of people affected by the processes of water scarcity, dispossession, contamination, and privatization. By focusing on personal trajectories, this methodology makes it possible to understand how transformations in water governance differentially impact rural communities, women, indigenous peoples, and impoverished sectors, revealing temporal, affective, territorial, and political dimensions that do not usually emerge in technical or quantitative approaches. This can be read in the testimony of Luna, a 55-year-old woman mountain inhabitant:

“I remember when I was a child, the weather was also like this, like now, that there is fog, that the sun comes out one day, the next day it doesn’t come out, that it had not rained for a long time in this weather. We used to go out with my sister to catch birds, at that time, we were all dirty, we used to go out in the middle of the mountains, catching birds with my sister, and there was also a lot of water back then. I used to say to my daughter, when I see the river, it makes me sad, because I saw that river was huge, in January, February, that river was huge. We used to bathe, it was not necessary to retire, we just had to go into the river, and we used to wash and play in the river.”

(Luna, Los Patos, 2024)

As Bertaux (1981) argues, life histories not only offer biographical data, but are also vehicles for exploring social structures from the perspective of those who inhabit them. In the case of water conflicts, this methodology makes it possible to record how people experience the tensions between access to water and extractive models, as well as the daily strategies of resistance, care, and defense of the territories. Moreover, this relational and situated perspective aligns with approaches such as political ecology and decolonial feminisms, which understand that conflicts over water are also conflicts over life, bodies, and memory (Zwarteveen and Bennet 2005; Neimanis 2017). In turn, the hydrofeminist approach, a current of ecofeminisms that historicizes the relationship of women and dissidents with water, analyzes the power relations generated in that link. It is a perspective critical of capitalism and patriarchy, recognizing in this intersection a myriad of oppressions as a consequence, establishing categories of analysis of extractivism and development. The “conquest of water” (Linton 2010) is the name given to the phenomenon by which a univocal way of understanding water as H₂O has been installed, as a chemical compound with no more transcendence than its functional and concrete utility. A step towards making this perspective of water more complex is when it is pluralized and its possibility of diversifying is conceived, giving way to calling it “waters” by recognizing its diverse and non-universal potentialities: its cultural, social, and economic dimensions, which are translated into human and non-human bodies. These have not been immutable in time because something that characterizes waters is that they are subject to permanent transformations and movements. This was reflected in our conversations as we embroidered the hydrofeminist textile map, during which the inhabitants of the basin recognized their place within the hydrosocial territory and articulated their emotional connections to the waters. The affective links with nature can be recognized in reflections such as Margarita’s:

“It was there that all this connection was linked to where I come from, to how good nature was to me. When I was little, nature welcomed me every day. I was very crafty, I didn’t want to eat at school. And I would come home and there were a lot of fruit trees and that’s what I ate. My mother didn’t know. I mean, every day I ate walnuts, peaches, that’s what I ate. I didn’t eat anything else. Nobody knew that I ate only what the land gave me.”

(Margarita, Los Andes, 2024)

The generosity and abundance of the water territories are reflected in the testimonies collected, revealing a reciprocity and gratitude that is returned with care. Moreover, these affective bonds that run through the biographical trajectories account for the women’s resistance, because the connection with the waters gives them a sense of protection and defense:

“I sometimes think that I have more water than blood. With my father, who was a miner, I always went to see the water above. So, since I was a child, I was aware of what water was, from a very young age. And then life put me on this path (to be president of the Rural Drinking Water Association), I always say that things happen for a reason.”

(Sonia, Los Guzmanes, 2024)

Sonia served as president of an APR for 25 years. This unpaid work reflects a long history of passion and dedication which, as Sonia says, stems from a vital connection with water, not only from a productive point of view, but also from an emotional and territorial one. The historicization of water in terms of its use, consumption, relationships, and care is an account of constant disputes. The mere way of approaching it, as a resource, a common good, an articulating element, demonstrates the diverse experiences and conditions (historical, cultural, structural, and material) of the relationship with this element. This is why it is a localized phenomenon, situated, connected to the territories and the specific power relations that occur there. Therefore, the binary, hierarchical, and utilitarian view cannot be universal, but must be understood only as a colonial and hegemonic form that has been extended and conceived as the only legitimate and possible one.

In Chilean territory there has been a tradition of privatized water, which is ancient and has been rooted at the civil and legislative level since the republic was constituted (Ugarte 2003). This does not mean that this is the only way to conceive it, especially considering that the water administration model was imposed under a dictatorship and has not taken into consideration relational ontologies present in the territories (Escobar 2016). This is why it becomes relevant to explore and de-essentialize the link and understand ethnoterritories (Barabas 2010) that conjugate categories of time, space, and society that express other conceptions of nature and diverse ways of inhabiting space; in short, they propose other geographies .

From this point of view, in the hydrosocial territories (Damonte Valencia 2015), the bodies of water have stories clinging to the territories, local and embodied configurations. Several statements throughout the interviews show these rooted life histories, variegated with the waters of the territories. This statement of Sandra is an example: “my contact has always been with the land, with the water, with the hills” (Sandra, Putaendo, 2024). Memories of the waters and lands, so deeply familiar, emerged filled with tenderness and gratitude, like in Margarita’s testimony:

“That is, I could not imagine any other life because I, for example, came home from school in the afternoon, alone in the summer, and I would go to the ravine. And I could spend the whole day bathing in the creek. That creek was formed by a snowdrift when the snow fell and those pools were next to it. So, for me, it was a world and I found it so beautiful and we used to go on trips when I was a child to the ravines because there in the mountains you didn’t have to pay for swimming pools, no. That is to say, you went to the ravines to swim. That is to say, one went to the ravines to bathe. So, that gives you a very close bond with nature and water. Unforgettable.”

(Margarita, Los Andes, 2024)

Emotional bonds, filled with joy and affection, are what make us want to defend what we care about: “For me it is the sacred river, when I see it there full of water it gives me such great joy, so much happiness” (Luna, Los Patos, 2024). In these contexts, hydrofeminist voices emerge as key figures in contexts of socio-environmental crisis, making known accounts and histories of people and communities that live in the flesh the experience of rejoicing and enjoyment with water (Figure 4), as well as the dispossession of their bodies and water experiences. Because there are bodies located in specific geographies that are inevitably more affected than others, from there emerge practices of resistance and recovery of misappropriated waters. Racial, class, gender, and other oppressions are intertwined with environmental exploitation. Systematic violence is rooted in their bodies as a result of environmental racism experienced by their bodies and territories. Gathering emotionality in the links with the pluriverses (Escobar 2016) can give us clues for present and future socioecological scenarios, since there is a biocultural memory that includes knowledge and knowledges that remain resilient in the face of contemporary challenges (Skewes and Guerra 2004).

6.4. Spirituality as Territorial Defense Strategy

Claudia is part of a territorial organization that draws deeply on spirituality as a tool of resistance. Collectively, the organization articulates its thinking as Claudia puts it:

“There is no defense for Mother Earth without connecting with all the spirits that inhabit her, right? Allies. That is, it is like asking them also to support us. That is to say, to connect with the Apu, with the spirits of the guanaco, with the condor, the pumas, with the spirit of the river and everything that surrounds us. Because it’s like, how are we going to be defending without connecting with them.”

(Claudia, San Esteban, 2024)

Spiritual ties show other ways of connecting and relating to the land, beyond the productive and instrumental. Recognizing the pluralization of narratives and listening to the voices of the subordinated territories implies recognizing otherness and difference and making visible those ways of life of the peoples that are intertwined with the land. Non-hegemonic spiritualities (which are on the margins of Western society) carry wisdoms that still resist the violence and interference in the territory of other masculinized and hierarchical religions. They constitute vestiges of the original cultures, tools of survival and resistance of the peoples. “Because I have a lot of respect for water. I respect it and bless it every day. I say, Lord, thank you for this water. I bless it. Because without water we do not live, daughter. It is the vital element for living” (Luna, Los Patos, 2024) (Figure 5).

“Since I was a child, I go up there every year. I go to Los Patos. If I don’t go to pray with people, I go alone and I make an offering up there for mother earth. I make an offering to the agüitas. I make offerings to the apus. I am always praying. I always pray upstairs.”

(Sandra, Putaendo, 2024)

The process that has occurred from the coloniality of being (Fanon 1999) and knowledge (Lander 2003) can be recognized here, because spirituality is the basis and point of origin of territorial knowledge (Millanguir 2017) that questions colonial precepts. “We make rogation for water so that it rains, we take the virgin out there to the estuary because it was a very dry year and after that it rained. We are so grateful to the virgin!” (Luna, Los Patos 2024). Likewise, Claudia indicates the following: “in the year 2020 the drought was very desolate, the animals died of thirst and hunger in a desperate way. The mountain range was full of carcasses of cows and animals that died as a result of the drought. So, there was also a lot of ceremonies to ask for the rains to return, and they have returned, they have returned. The rain is back, the snow is back, notoriously” (Claudia, San Esteban, 2024).

Hydrofeminisms focus on the relations of water communities beyond the idea of property (state or private) but rather break with the anthropocentric and colonial perspective. Water is an element that “embodies and reflects the social relations that modify it materially, and represent it symbolically” (Budds 2012, p. 170). Waters are constantly being modified by power relations and, reciprocally, they also influence social relations, shaping the formation of society. Moreover, bodies of water do not themselves contain gendered features with dichotomous categories. This is how Seba Calfuqueo, a Mapuche artist, explains it from her embodied experience:

“The waters are not binary, they do not respond to the feminine or the masculine, and it is with this power of non-identification with binarism that I could with my identity, which did not fit into these categories. Gender is something that runs, it does not stop in rigid categories, just like the waters when no one stops them.”

(Calfuqueo 2022, p. 33)

“Water transits are not necessarily benevolent or dangerous. Rather, they are material maps of our multivalent forms of marginality and belonging” (Neimanis 2017, p. 15). In this way, hydrofeminisms recognize the blurring of boundaries, as well as the centrality of the multiple waters that exist in bodies-territories, without making arbitrary differentiation as has been done through the instrumental rationality instated through legal and legislative frameworks. One of the interlocutors testifies that water is literally her element: she comments that she never approaches the river or the sea without submerging, because “that is my element, I am part of them” (Sandra, Putaendo, 2024). The knowledge of community feminisms is gathered, which proposes as a central concept that of territory-body, recognizing through cartographies the violence that has occurred there, positioning them in the face of the historical victimization located there, accounting for oppressions resulting from the extractivism of the territories and the violence resulting from neoliberalism. Those bodies-territories that have been a source of dispute by the capitalist patriarchy (Cabnal 2017) are also a source of resistance. This can be seen in the account of one of the interlocutors who, through her biographical account, shows how water has been a central element: on the one hand, it has been a source of work and sustenance (she and her husband are farmers, and depend on water for the vegetable garden and their animals); on the other hand, it is an existential link with nature: “what the land gives her, the land sustains us (…) I tell her that sowing is rebellion.” (Sandra, Putaendo, 2024).

7. Discussion and Final Reflections: Hydrofeminist Struggles for Water Justice

The restorative and ecological justice approach seeks the restitution of the integrity of the territories and positions itself as a territorial approach of proximity where spirituality stands as a tool for the defense of the territory. Thus, it also establishes the need to respond to the needs of people and their social fabrics, putting their stories at the center, and from there, collective resolutions that are interwoven with others emerge. In this way space is also given to the understanding of bodies of water, land, and animals in their condition of subject: “an ethical perspective of ecology on nature, life and the planet includes a questioning of modernity and development, even more an irrefutable criticism of the developmentalist fallacy” (Escobar 2003, p. 78).

Water has been recognized as an essential human right to ensure life, health, dignity, and progress (World Health Organization 2017); therefore, the climate crisis is an ethical and political problem because human rights are in conflict. Global South people are subjected to disproportionate exposure to pollutants and dispossession of territories and natural assets: access is fenced off and the possibility of having clean air and drinking water is becoming smaller every day.

Environmental racism (Moreno 2019) and accumulation by dispossession are interrelated with the exploitation and oppression of ethnic bodies and populations. Thus, violence is intersectional (an intertwining of categories of oppression) and is linked to the destruction of nature as well. Capitalist and patriarchal ideology has placed nature as an external system that apparently has nothing to do with human beings, and women in the realm of the home where they have remained invisible. The world is organized on the basis of those who move and own capital, which has the usual consequences: the destruction of forests, the poisoning of water, land, and air, the modification of riverbeds, poverty, and hunger, among others, which in essence means the destruction of the human species.

Capital establishes its parameters; thus, “subordinate” waters and lands also begin to exist. This is how “sacrifice zones” are erected, where those least responsible for the socioecological crisis are those who suffer the worst consequences. The life stories of women inhabitants of a hydrosocial territory in the global South show the capacities to adapt and cope with the consequences of extractivist capitalism. The less capital one has, the more vulnerable one is. Structural differences are based on differences generated by coloniality: they are patriarchal, racist, and anthropocentric.

Therefore, the dialogue of knowledge (Leff 2011) allows an amplified and integral vision of the planetary environmental crisis that is directly related to the extractivisms of bodies and territories and that—mainly—are feminist voices (from decolonial feminisms, ecofeminisms, territorial feminisms, and community feminism, among others) that make a demand for justice from a political ecology that recognizes the various factors that affect the construction of the patriarchal, capitalist, colonialist, and predatory system of nature (Curiel 2009; Cabnal 2017; Bolados and Sánchez 2017; Ulloa 2021). From this approach, culture and nature are imbricated in the construction of the world. The political ecology of the South accounts for the relevance of subjective processes in the ways of relating communally and with nature, and in the ways of establishing ties with the territories, in relation to the subalternity of the land.

What is related to the production of the common and the reproduction of the species is implicitly established as secondary and is inscribed as absence, as lack, where a set of valuable and essential activities are generally considered subordinate or feminine (Gutiérrez 2014, p. 88): health, the preparation of meals, rites and spirituality, affective bonds, and the reproduction of life (Ibarra and Jubany 2024). In short, these fundamental elements, under an instrumental rationalist and masculinized conception (Aedo 2019), are delegitimized and excluded from the political arena. This causes women in public spaces to be subordinated in the social hierarchy. Decision-making spaces are masculinized. Contributing to previous research on the incorporation of women’s voices in water governance initiatives, it is realized that the r-existence strategies carried out by rural women envision a collaborative present and future (Hernando-Arrese and Ibarra 2025). Therefore, there is a recognized need to go beyond the superficial and essentialist approach to gender, to move beyond the universalist view of care, and to recognize it with an intersectional perspective. The dimensions of gender, race, and class are absent in the conversations, despite the fact that they relate to territorial oppressions of violence that are increasingly present in their management.

The current environmental crisis is a social problem; the global water crisis has made water a highly contested and unevenly distributed resource, often leading to deep social conflicts. This problem is exacerbated by the commodification and lucrative exploitation of water, rooted in colonial practices and shaped by North–South geopolitics, which has serious repercussions for the most vulnerable communities and ecosystems. This article offers a sociological and ecopolitical reflection from biographical hydrofeminist trajectories of women living in conflict zones, recognizing how corporate and state actors take advantage of governance structures to control water resources and how communities mobilize to challenge these actions and defend other relationship dynamics. Through the experiences and life histories of women inhabitants of the global South, in this article I account for hydrofeminist elaborations and perspectives that explore the affective interconnections between fluids and bodies of water, fundamental to sustaining life and resisting the politics of death. Thinking from the perspective of water and multispecies dynamics in the face of extractivist and colonialist logics allows us to recognize hydrofeminist struggles for water justice in territories oppressed by the coloniality of water.