IN TIJUANA, PEOPLE MARCH FOR MANY THINGS.

Water Is Not One of Them.

By Vicente Calderón.

TIJUANA, Mexico — "It's not fair — the bills never fail," said Agustina Barajas, sitting in the living room of her small house in Villas del Campo, on the eastern edge of this border city. She couldn't hide a trace of irritation, though she considered herself lucky: her water was only cut for one day.

"I had filled the drums because they said it would be out for four days."

The drums — two blue cylindrical containers she keeps in her very tight one-car garage that her family converted to a patio— are standard equipment in this working-class neighborhood of identical small homes, built in recent years by developers who seem to compete on how little space they can offer. In front of the house sits a third drum, used for trash. Inside, the two water drums wait for the next cutoff.

And there is always a next cutoff.

This border city knows how to protest. Residents have marched against the murder of journalists, demonstrated outside government offices demanding answers for the disappeared, and organized labor actions that have shut down factories and paralyzed traffic along the busiest land border crossing in the western hemisphere.

But it practically does not mobilize when the water is taken away.

The muted reaction to one of the worst water disruptions in recent memory has exposed something deeper than a single infrastructure failure: a city that has quietly, incrementally, learned to live without reliable water — and in doing so, has largely stopped demanding it.

The disruption that affected Ms. Barajas and hundreds of thousands of other residents began at midnight on January 8th, when the CESPT — the Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, the state water agency — cut service to 691 neighborhoods across Tijuana and Playas de Rosarito to carry out repairs on the city's aqueduct system. The agency said service would be restored within four days.

It was not.

Schools canceled classes. Small businesses closed or reduced operations. Life in Tijuana was seriously disrupted, with some residents reporting up to ten days without water. Frustration and complaints flooded social media. Almost no one went outside to protest.

"People complain, but on Facebook," said Yolanda Rodríguez, a resident of Colonia Miramar, another neighborhood where water did not return for eight days. "Nothing really happens."

Ms. Rodríguez lives on the west side but like Ms. Barajas on the far east side of the city, keeps two blue 200-liter drums in her patio, filled with water. She has kept them filled for years, because the water goes out a lot.

When the January cutoff arrived, she did what she always does: she did laundry in advance, stocked up on paper plates and disposable cups, bought antibacterial soap and wet wipes. She expected four days and eight days was too long.

"We were rationing it, but it wasn't enough," she said. "To bathe you need a bucket. Women with long hair need more".

Out of necessity they were very efficient.

But efficiency has a price. Ms. Rodríguez tallied the added expenses: the disposables, the bleach, the air fresheners, the small three-liter jugs of purified water her son-in-law bought at elevated prices to wash the baby bottles of the infant she cares for during the day.

"It affects your wallet in a thousand ways," she said. When the bill arrived, there was no discount. "They do whatever they want."

On the city's western edge, in the coastal neighborhood of Playas de Tijuana — bordered to the north by the wall that divides Mexico from the United States and to the west by the Pacific Ocean — Alejandro Marín fared considerably worse during the same period.

The chemist thought he was prepared. Three years ago, after the cutoffs began coming more frequently, he installed a Rotoplas on his roof — the brand name of a plastic storage tank that has become a fixture across many Tijuana communities. A private infrastructure solution to a public infrastructure failure.

His neighborhood sits at the far western end of the city's distribution network, the last stop on a system that must push water uphill through miles of aging pipe.

"Here it works by pressure, because the water has to climb into the hills," he said. "Even when CESPT says the water is back and it's arriving — it's not true. It doesn't arrive."

The tank was not enough. Eight days for a household of three exceeds any domestic reserve. He ended up buying jugs at a supermarket and is now considering a second, larger underground tank.

"Even with all the precautions — bathing with buckets, coordinating bathroom use, using the minimum of dishes, using disposables — the water doesn't last," he said.

Alejandro was born in Oaxaca and moved to Tijuana expecting to find a more modern, better-served city. In Oaxaca, he said, people respond differently when the taps run dry.

"When there's no water in certain neighborhoods, people block streets, they close things down, they go to City Hall, there are complaints, there are lawsuits," he said. "Here, people need to understand that water is a right, not a favor from the government."

The shared grievance of nearly every resident interviewed for this article was not only the duration of the cutoff, but what came after: a water bill that reflected none of it.

A group of organized lawyers has announced a lawsuit against the CESPT, seeking to compel the agency to reimburse users for the days in which no service was provided — apparently the first time such a claim has been pursued in an organized legal form in the city.

Ms. Rodríguez had heard about it, vaguely. She was skeptical. "I don't think they'll do anything about it. The water has gone out before and the bills have never gone down." Still, she said, someone should try. "It should be challenged. Because it affects a lot of people, even if they minimize the problem."

To understand why Tijuana is perpetually short of water it helps to understand where Tijuana is.

Hernando Durán is an engineer who leads Tijuana Verde, an environmental organization. He also spent six years as director of the CESPT — the last official to serve a full administration in that role — and describes Tijuana as one of the most difficult cities in the world to supply with water.

It has no permanent rivers. Annual rainfall averages just 223 millimeters. By 1960, when the population reached 200,000, the city had already exhausted its natural water supply and was forced to begin importing from elsewhere.

"Theoretically, we have already been living at Hour Zero since 2022, 2023," Mr. Durán said — the point at which supply can no longer meet demand.

"Because we no longer have water for those who arrive." The desalination plant the state government has planned will not be ready before 2029 and he estimates that it is very likely that one in eight neighborhoods could face complete loss of summer supply this year.

The shortage, in other words, is not inevitable — it is cyclical, and the cycle is driven as much by political will as by rainfall. Older residents remember when the system worked. Through a combination of investment and competent management, the crisis once faded from memory. The pumps in backyard cisterns sat idle for years. Some broke from disuse. The problem, it seemed, had been solved.

It had not been solved. It had been managed. When that management eroded — through rapid population growth, construction permitted faster than infrastructure could absorb it, and a revolving door of political appointees — the crisis returned. The blue drums and Rotoplas tanks are its monuments: a reminder, written in plastic on every rooftop, that the government's promises about water have a history of expiring before the dry season does.

For Luis Carlos López, a historian and professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, the problem belongs equally to authorities and citizens.

"There is a question of civic quality — of the civic condition of society," he said. He acknowledges that for several years, authorities successfully addressed the water shortage through the aqueduct and other works. But residents' complaints, he says, have gone largely unheeded — and the water crisis is only one symptom of a broader deterioration.

"I think we are having so many problems that the normal situation now is to have many problems," he said, citing insecurity, power outages, and unplanned urban growth.

Mario Zepeda Jacobo has heard versions of that diagnosis for years. His response is not despair — it is paperwork, assemblies, and signature drives.

Mr. Zepeda, coordinator of the Comisión Estatal Ciudadana del Agua and founding president of the Consejo Ciudadano, a statewide civic organization, has spent more than a decade trying to channel private frustration into structural change.

His diagnosis of the silence is direct. "Everyone is organized," he said. "Small crime is organized, large crime is organized, politicians are organized in parties, religious groups are organized in churches. Everyone is organized except society."

When his group asks residents whether they want a citizen representative inside the water agencies — with the power to audit, intervene and report irregularities directly to the public — the answer is consistently the same. "They tell me, 'Yes, where do I sign?'" he said. "What we lack is possibly the energy to reach enough people."

He is candid about the limits of street protest. His organization has won fights before — against a property tax increase, against the exclusion of parts of Baja California from a federal economic zone. But the energy dissipated each time. "People also get tired. If we call a demonstration every month, fewer people come each time." The goal, he said, is permanent representation — a citizen commissioner inside each water agency, elected by civic commissions, reporting to the public rather than to politicians.

Shortly after the January cutoff, representatives from civic organizations, academia, professional associations and private citizens gathered at a public forum organized by Mr. Zepeda's group. They discussed the consequences of the crisis and new laws that recognize water as a human right, hoping to coordinate their efforts and define the public's role going forward.

Yolanda Rodríguez, Alejandro Marín and Agustina Barajas knew nothing of that forum or Mr. Zepeda's initiative. Only one of them had heard of the lawyers' lawsuit.

"People reach a point of desperation," she said. "But then — well, the water came back. And there are bigger problems."

The bill, when it arrives, will be for the full amount.