Valeria was born in the Callvú Leuvú basin. Translated into Spanish as “arroyo azul” or “blue stream,” the name refers to the hue that the reflection of the blue flowers on the shore gave to the river, and was the one given to the area by the Querandí. She lived on a cattle ranch, founded on expropriated land in 1831 by the “local justice of the peace”, an illegitimate son of Belgrano adopted by Rosas. There, her paternal great-grandfather planted a eucalyptus forest, as well as a grove to shade the cows, dug irrigation canals, and built mills. She grew up among horses and fruit trees, gathering peaches, plums and blackberries in the summer, and walnuts and persimmons in autumn. She witnessed the transition from traditional methods of crop cultivation, in which wheat, sunflower and pastures transmuted the flat line of the landscape into different colors, as they became supplanted by soybean monoculture: almost phosphorescent green, an illusion of the accelerated, devastating use of agrochemicals. She later moved to large cities where the sky is scarcely seen, though every so often she would happen upon Orion’s belt at night. She has lived in both Buenos Aires and New York, where one comes across rural landscapes only in museums, but she nevertheless continues to write about indomitable silence, etched by wildfire into the pampas.