The Story of Salitrillo| Building Community Organization to Assure Safe Water for Future Generations

Photo: Community leaders from Salitrillo share their experiences working on their water issues.

The community of Salitrillo is located next to Presa Allende (“Allende Reservoir”), the largest body of surface water in San Miguel de Allende. However, water from the Presa is not fit for human consumption or domestic use.  So, despite being so close to this reservoir, water in Salitrillo is actually pretty scarce. Like all the other communities in the region, rural and urban alike, Salitrillo depends on groundwater from underground aquifers for their normal water needs, and they are decreasing at an extremely rapid rate, making consistent access difficult for tens of thousands in our region.

Complicating the issue, and even more worrisome, the water that is available is severely contaminated with arsenic and fluoride, causing irreversible impacts on human health. Dental fluorosis is common in many people in Salitrillo, especially children who are more acutely impacted by these contaminants. Residents are also at risk for other chronic conditions like crippling skeletal fluorosis, chronic kidney disease, cognitive and developmental impairments in children, and even several types of cancer.

Photo: María de Jesús, from Salitrillo, posing next to a rainwater system in progress.

In 2019, María del Jesús and other community members from Salitrillo decided to take matters into their own hands. This initial group of community mothers, concerned about the health of their children, began organizing, and, together with Caminos de Agua, constructed the first massive rainwater harvesting system for the local elementary school, to help combat the health impacts they were seeing in their children from drinking contaminated well water. 

That first system was the catalyst for this core group to expand clean water access throughout their community. After its completion, María and the other women began an extensive process of educating and organizing other concerned families in the community, providing their own workshops with support, materials, and encouragement from Caminos.  As the community organization grew, together, we began building rainwater systems in individual households, to assure that clean water access was not limited only to the school. But they knew that was not enough either. 

"We began worrying about our health and that's why we started reaching out to see if there was any alternative to the water we were drinking...that's how we found out about Caminos de Agua. But once we built our own rainwater systems, we couldn't stop there. We had to reach others from our broader community. We needed to keep on working not just for us but for all of our neighbors."

María del Jesús, teacher, organizer and mother from Salitrillo

Photo: Presa Allende from the Salitrillo side.

The efforts from the community of Salitrillo have continued to grow over the last three years, across several different phases. Individual supporters, as well as new collaborators like Rotoplas and Planet Buyback, have helped finance more rainwater systems there. Today, because of the efforts of María de Jesús and her core group, 37 families now have their own rainwater harvesting systems – representing a lifetime of access to clean drinking water for each of them.

Photos: community members from Salitrillo in front of their recently installed rainwater harvesting systems.