90-Year-Old Activist Leads Push to Save Ancient Mexico Canals

Amalia Salas Casales still remembers drinking straight from the crystal-clear canals of Xochimilco as a child, surrounded by floating farms that fed millions. Now 90, she's leading the charge to bring those waters back to life.

Known as Abuela Amalia, this grandmother from Mexico City has spent six decades defending the chinampas, an ancient system of canals and floating agricultural islands dating back to Aztec times. When she was young, the water teemed with native fish and plants that her family cooked with using recipes passed down through generations.

Today, those same canals are choked with pollution and shrinking under urban sprawl. The axolotl, a tiny amphibian found nowhere else on Earth, is now more common in video games than in its natural home.

But Abuela Amalia refused to watch quietly. Last year, she traveled to a conservation summit in another region and convinced organizers to bring their next gathering to Xochimilco. This March, she helped host the Cumbre Internacional Xochimilco Vida y Paz, a four-day international summit that brought together 170 people from six countries.

The gathering united traditional farmers, Indigenous leaders, scientists, and lawmakers around one bold goal: giving the canal system legal rights as a living entity. Instead of treating Xochimilco as property to be managed, this approach would recognize the ecosystem itself as having rights that communities are responsible for protecting.

The summit ended with participants declaring Xochimilco a "Sanctuary of Life and Peace." They outlined concrete steps combining ecological restoration with community-led governance, putting local farmers and longtime residents at the center of decision-making.

Organizer Luis Prekoma sees Xochimilco as a model that could spread globally. "This is not just about Xochimilco," he explained. "It's about generating models that can be replicated in other territories."

The chinampas once covered 170 square kilometers. Today, only about 2,000 hectares remain, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. Abuela Amalia traces the sharpest decline to the 1990s, when legal changes allowed communal lands to be privatized and sold off.

The Ripple Effect

The summit brought people to the same table who rarely meet: elderly farmers who've worked the chinampas for generations sat alongside international scientists and government officials. Together, they're building a restoration plan rooted in both ancestral knowledge and modern ecology.

Similar gatherings in other Mexican regions have already sparked conservation wins. Now communities across Latin America and beyond are watching Xochimilco to see if giving nature legal rights can succeed where traditional conservation has struggled.

For Abuela Amalia, the fight is personal and practical. She carries baskets of flowers and vegetables through the same canals where she played as a child, determined that future generations might one day drink from those waters again.