Andrea Villarreal Rodriguez localizes climate storytelling in her native Monterrey

When National Geographic Explorer Andrea Villarreal Rodriguez talks about her work as a filmmaker, teacher and climate activist, she exudes an honest hope. Her days, including weekends, typically involve touring locals through Monterrey’s Santa Catarina River, a deserted, but critical water supply system for citizens of the urban center. Over the years the river, which frequently runs dry, has served as a soccer field, a motor racing track, or an amusement park — anything but a river — because until recently, people hadn’t regarded it as ecologically important.

With its statistics about poor air quality, droughts and severe seasonal floods, Monterrey, an economic hub and concrete jungle, is far from a natural paradise. In Monterrey, Villarreal understood one prevailing attitude toward one’s surroundings: “There’s nothing here, and nothing to take care of here.”

“Today we have 10 local organizations banding together to mobilize legal protection of this place [the Santa Catarina River],” Villarreal Rodriguez shares. Viaje al Microcosmos, which translates to “Journey to the Microcosmos,” is one such organization bringing visibility to the river through art and citizen science. Villarreal is a co-organizer of the small but mighty team of six young women.

The point is to get people to appreciate the river for what it provides — things like vegetation, clean air and wildlife biodiversity in the middle of the city. The efforts of Viaje al Microcosmos and affiliated organizations collectively formed the initiative #UnRíoEnElRío, “a river in the river,” helping keep the river a body of water and on the public agenda through social media activations, school experiences and guided river visits.

Villarreal approaches the local problem as she seems to with most challenges: with regard for the possibilities. It is as if her life’s lens is fixated on spotting beauty while acknowledging challenging realities.

“Once you’re down there on the river, you see the birds and hear the rustling of the trees. The morning light on the river is magical, it glows and glimmers a bit,” Villarreal Rodriguez reflects. “Some days, we [the Monterrey metropolitan area] also have the dirtiest air pollution on the entire continent. The river helps with that.”

The river’s trees help cool scorching temperatures wrought by climate change, while the vegetation banks prevent a potentially disastrous water flow during the flood season. However, the Santa Catarina’s history of overflowing, especially during Monterrey’s hurricane season, has historically overshadowed its ecological benefits — at least, it has for lawmakers.

Following the 2010 passage of Tropical Storm Alex in the region, the clearance of the Santa Catarina began as a measure to mitigate potential catastrophic damage caused by its flooding. A similar demolition effort was initiated in the summer of 2023 but the goal was shortsighted, and proved counterproductive: endemic vegetation was ripped from the soil, and colonized by invasive species.

In response, members of the “UnRíoEnElRío” collective held a town hall, the first town hall solicited by citizens in the history of the state of Nuevo León. The state government was pressured to halt demolition, and authorities promised to declare the Santa Catarina and its banks a Natural Protected Area.

According to local biologists, right now the river is the greenest it has been in a century.

“My role is being an organizer, a guide, but also a visual storyteller. I love telling stories about hope and resilience and trying to navigate that really thin line between urgency and optimism.”

‘There is natural beauty in my city’

“These bees come in such diverse forms! Some bees are blue, some are cute, chunky,” Villarreal Rodriguez marvels.

She became involved with the Santa Catarina while looking for stories for her capstone project in college. She developed a social media miniseries that focused on Monterrey communities exercising creative solutions to climate phenomena; including beekeepers, the Viaje al Microcosmos collective and a community of gardeners who cultivate food “on this tiny little piece of land in the middle of the city.”

The miniseries was Villarreal Rodriguez’s solution to feeling detached from her natural surroundings; she wanted to connect to the artists, scientists, and activists bridging the gap between humans and the natural world through their care for the environment.

Storytelling brought Villarreal Rodriguez to activism. Before leading efforts to restore and protect the Santa Catarina, Villarreal was focused on her own documentary and filmmaking work, and helping youth do the same. In 2022, with support from the National Geographic Society, and in partnership with the United Nations Foundation initiative, Girl Up, she founded The Storytelling Lab.

She was volunteering with Girl Up in Mexico at the time. Collaborating on projects committed to helping young women lead and develop their skills exposed Villarreal Rodriguez to the intersection of gender equality and climate justice.

“It made sense in the moment to create a collaboration with Girl Up and harness that community that really needed storytelling skills, which wasn’t in the programming,” Villarreal Rodriguez recalls. She wanted to fill the void in narratives about girls, by girls, who are by far the most vulnerable to the consequences of the climate crisis. In Mexico, where climate-related events occur regularly, there was no shortage of opportunities to demonstrate how these natural disasters drive humanitarian crises.

“Because we are portraying the impacts of the climate crisis on women and girls, there is no better person to tell those stories than the girls themselves.” And beyond the challenges they face, girls tell stories of adaptation, mitigation and resilience — like the rural community that harvests unique types of corn, and the way elderly women in particular are helping protect it from extinction. Though Villarreal Rodriguez isn’t presently partnered with Girl Up, The Storytelling Lab lives on and is evolving from its virtual classroom beginnings, born out of pandemic constraints, to in-person gatherings

This year she’ll host workshops from Monterrey about the monarch butterfly as it sojourns in the city en route from Canada. “Where do they live? Where do they go? There’s so many things you can uncover by asking questions and inviting youth to reflect.”

Villarreal Rodriguez and Fellow Explorers Markus Martínez Burman and Marco Molina, will shepherd students through film production, photo essay development and illustrations depicting their relationship with the migratory species, which flutters its iconic orange and black an astounding 3000 miles across North America each year.

Last October Villarreal Rodriguez started thinking about the monarchs after she and her mom witnessed a group of them passing over their home. The flutter, or kaleidoscope, of butterflies flew across their terrace, probably en route from Canada to a warmer winter home in Mexico. “How many really personal stories do we have about this species?” she wonders.

“It’s part of the narrative I think I’m trying to build that there is natural beauty in my city, and we still have time and we need efforts to protect those last urban natural spaces. And I think that’s what’s going to happen,” she says.

‘Everyone has a story to tell’

Right now, Villarreal Rodriguez’s time is divided between organizing climate activism events, developing workshops and telling visual stories of her own. “I want to keep doing storytelling, but it’s really urgent to try to save this natural space in my city. That’s taking a lot of my time right now,” she explains. “I feel so attached to this river, that when something goes wrong it’s really heartbreaking, but when something goes right, it’s great.”

For Villarreal Rodriguez, documenting the Santa Catarina and helping secure its future may involve following the flow to the source in La Huasteca, a canyon in Cumbres de Monterrey National Park. “We protected the river, now we have to protect the river in the mountains and what’s next? The sky, the hydrological cycle? I’ve learned so much and it’s completely changed my work.”

Her connection with nature was a somewhat spontaneous one. Her mother couldn’t get her to ditch her headphones to enjoy strolling reserves with only nature’s sounds as a teenager, she says. Walking the Santa Catarina for the first time shifted something in her, and she trudged on the natural path forward. “That day, the 30th of April, changed the course of my life.”

Her choice to study communications and pursue storytelling was also born in this spirit; it meant drifting from a reality in which she would spend her time building robots — which she can and has done — and perhaps would have for a living had she stuck with engineering.

Villarreal Rodriguez’s mother helped her connect with her surroundings, while her dad provided the cameras, video recorders and software. Her parents were both engineers, but their daughter would not be one. “I always saw filmmaking and didn’t know I could make it as a career. I picked arts when I applied to the local university because I thought I was not going to stay here. … I was impulsive about it, but I knew deep in my heart that’s what I wanted, to study film!”

Though, there was something attractive about the engineering trajectory. “I wanted to prove to the world ‘I am a woman in STEM!’ But being a woman in storytelling is also pretty cool.”

Villarreal and her mother are volunteers at the natural reserve they frequented in her younger years. In Monterrey, to believe “there’s nothing here and nothing to take care of here” can’t stand against the growing repertoire of stories about a city where nature and people are hungry for harmony. “In journalism, there’s this thing that maybe you have to tell the perfect story, but I think there’s value in a normal life,” she says. “Everyone has a story to tell.”

ABOUT THE WRITER
For the National Geographic Society: Natalie Hutchison is a Digital Content Producer for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.