Upflow
Mexico City’s water system is the costliest and most absurd on the planet. Dams in neighboring states hydro-elevate water past drought-stricken communities before the water arrives, polluted and chemically treated, into the drained lakebed of Mexico City…where the water is used before black, residual wastewater finally filters back to the countryside to grow food for the city.
In Diego Gerard Morrison’s darkly funny, picaresque, and hydro-ethnological stories, Upflow follows the path of water in and out of Mexico City. Scarcity, pollution, corruption and even amplified earthquakes rise through the ghostly lakebed of Mexico City’s past to manifest in the present. Through surrealist and historical romps spanning the Spanish conquest, the subsequent desiccation of the lake, as well as modern stories warning of the near future, Upflow’s prescient fictions embody the fluid nature of water and how it often eludes those who need it most.
ISBN: 978-1-952897-52-8
167pg
Forthcoming on October 27, 2026
Diego Gerard Morrison (Mexico City, 1984) is a writer, editor and translator whose recent work explores themes of Magical Realism and appropriation in the context of the Mexican drug war. His first book, The Wait (John of the Thing, 2021), is an appropriation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a setting of Mexican cartel violence and its resulting crisis of forced disappearances. His debut novel, Myth of Pterygium (Autumn House Press, 2022) was the winner of the Rising Prize in Fiction. He is the author of the novel Pages of Mourning (Two Dollar Radio, 2024) and the cofounder and editor of diSONARE, an editorial project based in Mexico City.