To address La Paz's severe water stress and the often-taboo topic of wastewater management, we needed a narrative that felt profoundly local. Typical, solemn environmental messaging was no longer working. People were tired of being lectured. We needed a strategy that bypassed resistance, sparked immediate empathy, and allowed the community to see their culture reflected in the story.

La palomilla del agua began with two characters created by a designer for an earlier campaign. I took on the creative direction, expanded the cast, and developed the full communication strategy. Each character was designed with intention: Pita — the resilient desert pitaya — wears traditional huaraches. Mascarita is inspired by the Peninsular Masked Yellowthroat, an endemic bird. Don Popo lets us talk about sanitation without stigma. And Prisca — based on Aspidisca, a microorganism that clarifies water — brings the invisible world of water quality into plain sight.

A three-part animated series built using distinctly paceño visual elements, addressing water issues in a fun, informative, and culturally relevant way. Co-created with academia, civil society organizations, the municipal water utility, and the state water commission. The most successful episode reached over 70,000 organic views.

A collection of character decals featuring local slang turned everyday citizens into active carriers of the message — placing the characters on laptops, water flasks, and car bumpers across the city. Simple and tangible, the stickers travelled where formal campaigns never could.

The characters also came to life as full-scale mascot costumes — botargas — that interact directly with the public at events and public spaces, bringing the palomilla crew into playful, face-to-face encounters with the community.

The characters became the visual language for complex systemic information. We used La palomilla to illustrate the entire Urban Water Cycle of La Paz, translating critical hydrological data into an accessible map. A physical scale model of the watershed travels to nearly every public event — making visible a process most people never think about until the tap runs dry. An illustrated children's book is also in development, following a single water drop from rain to aquifer to city pipes and back.

The process began with a virtual multi-actor session during COVID-19 lockdowns. Representatives from government, academia, and civil society worked together to identify the core variables impacting the watershed and how they relate to one another. Following the digital mapping, we convened an in-person workshop where participants could physically arrange and connect the variables — making the system tangible.

While the technical model was built in collaboration with an expert systems consultant, my role centered on facilitating the multi-sector workshops and translating the complex final product into an accessible visual design. The goal was not a perfect map — it was a shared space for honest conversation about the system everyone inhabits but no single actor sees whole.

The resulting visual map groups hundreds of variables into ten interconnected clusters — including administration, infiltration, water quality, demand, reuse, and citizen participation — each tagged by the responsible institutional actor. It became a key tool for the city's Action Program for Integrated Watershed Management (PAMIC La Paz), allowing decision-makers to visualize short, medium, and long-term effects of their strategies. Systemic maps are never truly finished; they evolve as context changes.

For decades, La Paz has had technical plans that often end up in drawers due to disconnected institutional priorities. The real challenge is governance: bringing diverse, sometimes opposing, actors to the same table to build shared visions that translate into actionable, long-term strategies. The question was not what needed to be done — it was how to make those who could do it want to act together.

The Advisory Council for the La Paz Municipal Water Utility (OOMSAPAS) is composed of the utility's authorities and citizen representatives. I was elected unanimously as President of the citizen section — the first woman, and the first person from civil society rather than the water technical sector, to hold the role. What I brought — and what had not been done before — was an environment of trust where every member could express their interests openly; common goals; and a clear sense of what the council would prioritize and advance during our mandate. For the first time, these meetings are moving from procedural exchanges into coordinated action.

Since 2023, I have coordinated the Alianza Agua Recuperada, a coalition bringing together the municipal utility, the state water commission, academia, and conservation NGOs. Together, we are working to transform treated wastewater from a problem into a vital asset for our desert city — through joint advocacy, narrative change, and on-the-ground work.

Since 2025, I have also coordinated a newly formed multi-actor group alongside international and local organizations — including the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), Fundación Gonzalo Río Arronte (FGRA), and Alumbra Innovations Foundation (AIF) — tasked with co-designing a comprehensive, long-term water resilience strategy for La Paz.

In December 2025, fifteen institutions and twenty-two people gathered in one of the rare spaces where these actors have ever fully converged. The conclusion of that gathering was clear: there is shared will to do this differently.

One pillar of the Alliance focuses on restoring artificial wetlands as spaces for life and natural filtration. We are not just recovering biodiversity; we are transforming the site into an educational urban park where residents come to walk and watch birds — including the Peninsular Masked Yellowthroat, an endemic species that has made these wetlands its home. What was once an eyesore is becoming a place people visit and care about — a living example of nature-based water treatment integrated into the urban fabric.

We work hand-in-hand with OOMSAPAS to build the operational capacity of the Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP): providing laboratory equipment for water quality analysis, training courses on wetland management and Mexican water reuse standards, and opportunities for plant staff to connect with the national water network through ANEAS. Our goal is to support the conditions under which treated water quality improves enough to expand its use across the city.

This work turns urban spaces into sponges: capturing, filtering, and infiltrating water before it is lost to runoff. Since 2019, nine urban spaces have been intervened, recovering native vegetation, building community stewardship, and measurably increasing rainwater infiltration into the aquifer.

Each site is designed in collaboration with the community who will care for it. The result is not just functional infrastructure — it is a space people feel ownership over, that carries meaning beyond its technical purpose. These sites are slowly changing what La Paz expects from its own public spaces.

The native plant identification guide was my idea: a practical tool for residents, urban planners, and landscapers to recognize and choose drought-resistant local flora. The native vegetation palette already existed at Niparajá; what I led was a complete redesign of both its visual identity and its content. Together, these tools are doing something urgent: building a culture of native planting in a city that will depend on its own vegetation to stay cool, absorbent, and alive as the climate shifts.