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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Wayúu women in La Guajira, Colombia, make groundwater perceptible through embodied bioindicators such as taste, smell, dreams, animal behavior, and infrastructural signals. It shows how these practices produce hydofeminist leadership and alternative ways of knowing aquifers.

Paper long abstract

Groundwater is often described as difficult to govern because it is invisible. Hydrogeological approaches have developed methods to render aquifers legible and manageable. Yet these techniques frequently isolate groundwater from the social and ecological relations through which it is experienced and interpreted. Drawing on insights from the hydrosocial cycle literature (Linton & Budds, 2014), this paper examines how groundwater becomes perceptible through everyday engagements that extend beyond conventional hydrogeological methods.

The study is based in Wayúu communities in La Guajira, a semi-arid region of Colombia, where groundwater constitutes the primary water source for Indigenous populations. In this region, water scarcity is shaped not only by climatic variability but also by extractive expansion and uneven state presence(Ulloa, 2016). Building on Latin American feminist political ecology and the water–body–territory framework (Cabnal, 2010), the paper analyzes how Wayúu women interpret and manage deep wells through what we term embodied bioindicators.

These indicators include sensory perceptions such as taste, smell, color, and tactile reactions to saline water, as well as dreams, animal behavior, vegetation stress, and infrastructural failures. We argue that these practices constitute alternative modes of making groundwater visible, where aquifer dynamics are inferred through distributed sensory systems involving human and non-human bodies.

Through these engagements, Wayúu women develop forms of hydrofeminist leadership, as their capacity to interpret groundwater conditions and sustain water infrastructures generates situated authority over water governance. In doing so, they challenge technocratic regimes of groundwater knowledge and reconfigure the subsurface as a space of territorial care and political contestation.