Seven centuries ago, the capital city of the Aztecs was built in the middle of a lake-filled valley, with water feeding the region. Across time and governments, the area was drained and filled in, its streams piped and turned into sewers. Suffering from a decades-long drought yet inundated during summer storms, Mexico City, built on the ruins of the once water-rich Tenochtitlán, is in acute crisis.
While revamping Mexico City’s water management is an expensive and time-intensive process, the nonprofit Isla Urbana has been working on a stopgap measure: installing and maintaining neighborhood rainwater-collection systems, alongside educating communities and students on water conservation. Krishna Chandrasekhara, a rising fourth-year student from Irving, Texas majoring in health and societies, has been volunteering with Isla Urbana since high school and continued his work this summer as the recipient of a 2024 Paul and Kathleen Barthmaier Award through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) for his project, Rainwater Harvesting and its Impacts on Public and Community Health in Mexico City.
The project looks at both population health outcomes and mental health outcomes, says Iliana Kohler, practice associate professor in sociology and associate director of the Population Studies Center. She advises Chandrasekhara on methods. “What the project does is essentially synthesize insights and matters from sociology, demography, anthropology, and history,” she says.
Chandrasekhara spent three weeks in Mexico in June interviewing community members, public health officials, and Isla Urbana staff about their relationship to water, looking at both the diversity as well as commonalities in perspectives. “I really got to see how much of their water shortage was a public health issue,” Chandrasekhara says.
This year, Mexico’s rainy season didn’t start until late June, he says. The hostel he was staying in ran out of water twice and had to order water from a private company. Five thousand liters of water costs about $215 and lasts just three or four days, he says. “It really put in perspective how dire the situation is.”
Chandrasekhara first became interested in water issues as a child travelling to India and seeing the differences in water quality.
“We’d always have to consume bottled water and be very safe about our food,” he says.
Initially, he thought clean water access was only an issue outside the U.S., but seeing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, brought the issue home, Chandrasekhara says. When he had the opportunity to volunteer with Isla Urbana in high school, he felt drawn to the work.
Chandrasekhara’s continued work with Isla Urbana has been an advantage, says John Kanbayashi, assistant professor in the History and Sociology of Science Department. Kanbayashi is one of Chandrasekhara’s project advisors and will continue to work with him on an honors thesis project based on the CURF summer research. “He’s not coming in just as a disinterested researcher. It’s really using an ethnographic, anthropological method that incorporates community engagement to look at the intersection of public health and environment.”
“People have always been working very hard to get water,” Kanbayashi says. “In a time of climate change, rainwater harvest has this promise of using a resource that’s out there, that flows through the built environment and is not actively used,” he says, noting that sometimes maintaining simple systems across communities can be more effective than implementing expensive new technologies.
