Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City
408
Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City
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Overview
Not long after the conquest, the City of Mexico's rise to become the crown jewel in the Spanish empire was compromised by the lakes that surrounded it. Their increasing propensity to overflow destroyed wealth and alarmed urban elites, who responded with what would become the most transformative and protracted drainage project in the early modern America—the Desagüe de Huehuetoca. Hundreds of technicians, thousands of indigenous workers, and millions of pesos were marshaled to realize a complex system of canals, tunnels, dams, floodgates, and reservoirs.
Vera S. Candiani's Dreaming of Dry Land weaves a narrative that describes what colonization was and looked like on the ground, and how it affected land, water, biota, humans, and the relationship among them, to explain the origins of our built and unbuilt landscapes. Connecting multiple historiographical traditions—history of science and technology, environmental history, social history, and Atlantic history—Candiani proposes that colonization was a class, not an ethnic or nation-based phenomenon, occurring simultaneously on both sides of an Atlantic, where state-building and empire-building were intertwined.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804791076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| Sales rank: | 976,701 |
| File size: | 50 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dreaming of Dry Land
Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City
By Vera S. Candiani
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8805-2
CHAPTER 1
Living in a Fluid Landscape
* * *
For all the people who have lived in the basin of Mexico since the first wandering bands arrived perhaps eleven thousand years ago, the enclosed nature of the basin has been both a boon and curse. Until modern humans intervened, the encircling sierras prevented the precipitation that fell in their watersheds from draining out toward the ocean, so this moisture collected in the lowest parts of the basin and formed wetlands and shallow lakes fortified with sediments rich in organic matter. These wetlands, like those elsewhere, were extraordinarily productive ecosystems. Humans could appropriate from them large quantities of biomass to use for food, fiber, fuel, construction materials, and medicines without adversely impacting the systems' functioning. The basin could therefore support relatively large numbers of people who, over the course of millennia, parlayed food surpluses into the requisite elements of a settled and, in some locations, very urban way of life.
The basin's Indians, however, did not live in harmony with a benevolent environment. The basin's lack of an egress created the potential for buildup of salts in the soil and water and set the stage for regular seasonal flooding and occasional catastrophic floods during years with unusually high rainfall. The high water table, combined with the impermeability of the clay layers on the flat valley floor and other physical factors, meant that rainfall did not filter easily into the ground but instead pooled and spread. At the same time, the poor quality of the groundwater precluded the extensive use of wells to supply potable water.
Indigenous cultures dealt with these threats and opportunities through hydraulic engineering. People savvy about the hydrological regime, from commoners in small hamlets to state technicians in the powerful city-states along the shores, designed water management systems at every scale to achieve a combination of goals: maximize food production, prevent floods in urban centers, segregate brackish waters from fresh ones, import fresh water, and ensure canoe navigability. It is crucial to note that all these works were multifunctional and built with the understanding that water and land were in constant flux, not just in terms of location but also in terms of qualities.
As Ross Hassig and others have shown, the conquest did not end indigenous hydraulic engineering traditions. But it did affect them. With the decapitation of the indigenous states, large-scale projects—such as large dams, river diversions, and aqueducts—that demanded the efforts and resources of multiple communities could no longer be built or adequately maintained. But the vast hydraulic infrastructure erected by the indigenous lords remained in place, doing its job by inertia amid a lack of concerted efforts to either destroy or rebuild it on the part of the conquerors. The result was a desultory continuity in large-scale hydraulics around the urbanized core of the basin. This allowed some knowledge of water behavior and construction techniques associated with them to survive until the various entities of Spanish rule began rehabilitating and building large-scale structures in the 1550s. It was at the communal level, meanwhile, that indigenous hydraulic traditions seem to have best survived, as outlying communities made more deliberate efforts to maintain their smaller dams, ditches, and diversions.
But even in these smaller communities adjustments were necessary. The demographic decline during the postconquest decades affected all indigenous technological capabilities. As Cook and Borah suggested, communities adjusted by concentrating their efforts on lands, species, and structures that assured the maximum output for their labor. Terraces and other devices that had rendered marginal lands productive were neglected, while irrigation ditches and the equipment used for planting, storing, gathering, and hunting retained their vitality. Thus when the Desagüe arrived, it showcased both the dissolution of indigenous state engineering and the survival of the hydraulics of commoners at the village level. This becomes clear once we disaggregate the lumpy category of "indigenous technology" into its finer components.
SUBJECT AND VILLAGE HYDRAULICS
Before the arrival of the Spanish, the interconnected lakes of the basin, which are estimated to have covered about 1,500 of the basin's 8,058 square kilometers during rainy seasons at the end of first millennium, provided the watery building blocks of indigenous society. In the center was Lake Texcoco, lowest in elevation. North were Lake Zumpango at about six meters above Lake Texcoco and Lake Xaltocan at about half that; south were Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco, both hovering around three meters above the central lake (see Map 1 and Table 1). Runoff from the surrounding mountains flowed into the lakes and remained there until it evaporated or was absorbed by the soil. By the time the Chichimec forerunners of Moctezuma arrived in the basin, the shores of these lakes were already dotted with urban centers and agricultural settlements and colonies. Several city-states vied for control of the region's land, water, and people, as can be seen in Figure 1.1, which depicts the multiple lordships that surround the lake system.
For indigenous producers, water was inextricable from the land beneath it in that its seasonal recession left behind soils enriched for cultivation. In this environment, water and land were not clearly distinguished from each other. Fields became food-filled lakes in the rainy season; water was not just an irrigator but also a medium critical for fertility-sustaining ecological processes; cities were solid but not dry, and so on. This applies to the entire basin. In the old alluvial plain of the Cuautitlan River and the northern lakes of Zumpango and Xaltocan, water was even more crucial because that area was more arid. Seasonal inundation was the key factor that reduced crop risk, as it sustained soil moisture, fertility, and texture, rendering agriculture less dependent on rainfall. As elsewhere in the basin, indigenes in this region used water and land "ecosystemically"; that is, they hunted the animals and gathered the plants that the fluid landscape supported for the purpose of satisfying the basic necessities of life, and therefore had primarily what Marx called "use value" for land and water even after the conquest. This was not because they were somehow more reverent and less exploitative toward nature, but because they tapped into a broader spectrum of what water in combination with land encompassed. Their use of this environment ranged from simple appropriation of resources from relatively "natural" systems through hunting and gathering to intensive manipulation of the environment for food production through artificial horticultural beds raised above the surface of lakes (chinampas), river diversions, and canal building.
At the less manipulative end of their use of nature, indigenes supplemented their wetland agricultural systems with fishing, hunting, and gathering in order to diminish their high environmental risk (the possibility of frequent and huge variations in bio-physical conditions). These complementary activities were particularly sensitive to change in the northwest quadrant, where aridity made environmental risk higher than elsewhere in the basin. Commoners used a wide variety of forms of organization and tools such as nets, hooks, fishing spears, canoe flotillas, and family groups on land to harvest fish, fowl, reptiles, insects, larva, and algae. As elsewhere in Mesoamerica, in the northwest quadrant of the basin each plant and animal often had a number of uses, forming the basis of an economy that carried over into the colonial era and beyond. On the eve of the conquest, the Cuautitlan region may have supported a population of up to ninety-one thousand individuals, thanks in part to the ability of these people to extract 20 to 35 percent of their foods from wetland ecosystems.
At the most manipulative end of the continuum were agricultural systems dependent on large-scale structures. Chinampas belong to this category of works designed to maximize yield by intensifying nutrient availability within a limited space. Although there were at least five different ways of building chinampas, depending on the characteristics of the location, they all had the same basic requirements: shallow water with scant variation in level but sufficient circulation to ensure stable temperature and chemistry, plentiful vegetable organic matter and silts that did not exceed certain parameters of granularity and clay content, and the nearby presence of plants whose roots and stems could be used to help cohere the materials together and prevent the loss of soil due to erosion in case of flooding or severe rainfall. They varied in dimensions but were usually rectangular, built by filling in an armature of stakes (in freshwater lakes) or stones (in brackish water) with successive layers of silt and plant debris. They were all sensitive to lake levels, but freshwater chinampas particularly so since they were irrigated through capillarity. They were fertilized by organic materials ladled out of the surrounding waters.
The Xaltocanmecas began building their chinampas in the thirteenth century. Lake Xaltocan was brackish, so the first step was to leach the salts out of the terrain where the chinampa would be erected. This process began in the dry season, when the indigenes built a walled enclosure on the lakebed high enough to ensure the chinampa would remain above the level of the water during the rainy season. This enclosure was equipped with two sluices at the bottom. Then they began the process of leaching by filling the enclosure with freshwater brought in from the springs of Ozumbilla, at the foot of the elevation of Chiconautla, approximately seven kilometers away. Once the terrain was determined to have been cleansed of its salts, the process of layering materials could begin. The Xaltocan chinampa area, centered almost two kilometers southeast of the island-town of Xaltocan, would grow to some two hundred hectares by the time of the arrival of the Spaniards. The better-known Aztecperiod chinampas elsewhere in the basin were apparently based on this early model in Lake Xaltocan, which Tenochtitlan expanded further as Xaltocan fell under its control in 1428.
In addition to building chinampas, people in the northwest quadrant also reshaped their environment by diverting the most important river in the basin, the Cuautitlan River, and articulating a vast irrigation network to it. All of these activities required great mastery of the regional topography and hydrology. The Cuautitlan River diversion dam would become crucial to the Hispanic drainage project. Indeed, without this indigenous structure and the knowledge that went with it, there could be no Desagüe.
The Cuautitlan River ran year-round, although it was lower in the dry season. According to the Anales de Cuautitlan, the dam that diverted the river was originally built by Colhuas in the town of Cuautitlan long before the arrival of the Spaniards. These people had settled on the banks of the Cuautitlan River, a suitable location for much of the year. But when the river swelled in the rainy season, it tended to overflow its banks and flood the town, fanning out to the east and southeast over its alluvial plain before draining into Lake Texcoco. The Colhua began addressing this problem by changing the course of the river, splitting its waters by creating a second channel for its flow. This channel was designed to handle the river during its rainy season floodstage and divert it northward. Ethnohistorians tell us that the Colhua began this rerouting in 1433 by damming it back and flanking the new channel with a structure strong enough to withstand the pressure of the river in its floodstage as it tried to regain its former drainage. This structure was a diversion dam made of rammed earth secured in place by vertical stakes driven into the ground, and then it was consolidated with various live rhizomatous grasses. When this project finally ended, possibly in 1487 (8 acatl) the new channel drove the river through Citlaltepec into a place known as Aitictli, or "the meeting point," later known as Lake Zumpango. It is probable that this structure began downstream from the locality of Atlamica but upstream from the Indian town of Teoloyuca. It may have been up to twenty-five kilometers long.
As an earthen dam, this structure required specific familiarity with local soils and vegetation and knowledge of how the seasonal fluctuations affected humidity and plant growth. Cheap to build, all earthworks are vulnerable to destruction by the elements and the actions of humans and other animals. This one was no exception and required significant and constant investments of labor. The seasonal alternation of wet and dry conditions debilitated it, and the Cuautitlan River was liable to break through during peak rain events. Although we lack documentation about its problems and needs before the conquest, it is safe to assume that given the continuity in its basic form, the pre-Hispanic diversion dam was a fickle thing. Gophers (tusas) and snakes weakened its cohesion by riddling it with holes and tunnels. It demanded constant maintenance during both the dry season, when it was inspected, and at the beginning of the wet season, when it was repaired with new grasses.
Like people in other settlements across the area moistened by the Cuautitlan River, Teoloyucans accumulated great knowledge about the interplay among land, water, and biome in their region. Much of this knowledge originated in the local populations' roles in the pre-Hispanic transformation of the northwest quadrant into an agriculturally productive region. Faced with a burgeoning urban population at the imperial center, the Mexica lords of Tenochtitlan sent colonists to the northwest quadrant over the course of the fifteenth century to create hydraulic infrastructure to render the brackish lakes and the alluvial plain of the Cuautitlan River fruitful agricultural areas. The indigenous northward diversion of the Cuautitlan River happened at this time, leaving the old bed to become the trunk for the development of a network of four canals, each feeding a myriad ditches on the alluvial plain that conveyed water to eight thousand planted hectares, making it "one of the largest irrigation systems in the Basin."
This network seems to have depended on a second diversion structure that the Teoloyucan and other settlements participated in building and maintaining. This was a temporary structure, probably made of rock, branches, and earth placed across the new course of the river. It was used only during the dry season (October–May) to force the river's reduced flow into the network of irrigation canals, which fanned out from the east margin of the river. The impermanent nature of the dam, hence of its materials and construction techniques, was due precisely to the temporary need to acquire all the water in the river during dry spells. Although we lack a specific description of the dimensions and construction of this dam, it is clear that it was designed to be swept away by the bulging river when the rains arrived, allowing the diversion dam itself to bear the greater load of the water and drive the river northward. Local populations thus mastered at least two different types of flow-control structures along the Cuautitlan River: one meant to last and guide the river in the rainy season, the other to be destroyed and guide the river in the dry season. This mastery included the "facts" of their region—the materials, the topography, water flows, characteristics of the soil and capacities of the lakes in the district—as well as the organizational technology that interwove practices with seasons according to both hydrology and communal needs over the course of the year and coordinated the efforts of several communities.
THE VAST WORKS OF CITY-STATES
Of course the northwest quadrant populations did not live in a power vacuum; as a result, what they did to the local environment had both causes and effects in the rest of the basin, where water and land were hotly contested. After arriving in the basin in the fourteenth century, the Mexica ("Aztecs") rose from being mercenaries for their social betters to become feared partners of the kings of Tlacopan and Texcoco in the Triple Alliance of 1428, which established a complex, tributary empire. Each of the three great kingdoms remained autonomous within the Alliance and was sustained mainly by the labor and resource tribute from their own dependent kingdoms, provinces, and colonies that populated the lakeshores and the piedmont inside the basin, while subject regions beyond provided mainly tribute in kind. Buoyed by its conquest of such regions and its military power, by the end of the century Tenochtitlan had gained hegemony. Thereafter, its partners and other important kingdoms in the basin usually "agreed" to send artisans, laborers, and materials from their own tributary cities and provinces every time a Mexica king wanted a new temple or hydraulic work.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dreaming of Dry Land by Vera S. Candiani. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Images ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Abbreviations xxiii
Note on the Colonial Regime xxv
Introduction 1
1 Living in a Fluid Landscape 15
2 Dreaming of Dry Land 47
3 The Trench of Misfortunes 81
4 To Serve the City in Desagüe Country 121
5 All the King's Men 153
6 A Show of Patriotism at the End of the Trench 203
7 Toward "Waterless and Dry" Ground 249
8 Deep Colonizing 283
Epilogue 315
Notes 325
Index 363