Diego Rivera, El Agua, origen de la vida en la Tierra, 1951. Detail of the mural installed in the underwater distribution chamber of Cárcamo de Dolores, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City.

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EXCERPT:

Mexico City’s inciting incident is aquatic: Tenochtitlán was a small land mass connected by canals when seventeen horses arrived alongside Hernán Cortés in 1519, beasts so alien that Moctezuma, stoned on teonanácatl and weary of his own authority, invited them in with the focused curiosity of someone who is on mushrooms, euphoric and giggly. Seeing horses for the first time, their weight pounding the lakebed streets, Moctezuma allowed them to stay. The foreigners, arriving disoriented and psilocybined out of their minds by La Malinche, the mother of modern Mexico, saw a city on water, decapitated bodies hanging from El Templo Mayor. They saw an empire organized hydrologically, sustained by chinampas, aqueducts, and sluice gates, and decided to drain it. An ecological coup. Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, tortured with burning oil applied to his feet, told Cortés that all the gold had been thrown into the lakebed. Gold submerged, water hiding treasure.

The horses became the transmutation device: from lake to land, from water to stone, from Huītzilōpōchtli and Tlaloc to linear colonial desire, from Tenochtitlán to Ciudad de México. Indigenous allies, persuaded or coerced, filled in their own sacred canals, destroyed their own bridges, cut the throat of their hydraulic empire as though a valley of lakes could ever be turned into solid ground. To “drain the swamp” is to declare ownership. Drainage is the infrastructure of control: a bureaucratic gesture that converts mystery into property. Water resists grids; it leaks, evaporates, floods, vanishes. It holds secrets. Land, on the other hand, can be measured, divided, bought, and sold. The Spaniards, exhausted from their watery expeditions, wanted plazas and straight medieval streets, stone underfoot rather than mud. They wanted the urbanism of Castile imposed on a lacustrine ecology they barely understood.

So they began to redirect rivers, dig tunnels, and fill canals with rubble — often rubble made of temples and houses they themselves had destroyed. The crown wanted the lakes drained. The desagüe was entrusted to Enrico Martínez’s hands and, in 1607, the Huehuetoca tunnel collapsed repeatedly, a failure blamed on witchcraft rather than the limits of colonial engineering over an environment loaded with meaning for the indigenous. Still, the logic of desagüe hardened: tame the wild, eliminate the lakes, make a European city in the valley. Once these ideas were set, the ecological transformation of the valley was total. Mexico City grew not as an extension of its watery beginning but in opposition to it. The city began to dewater a wet reality. This ecological delusion, the colonial vampire in action, shapes the city. As the earth became thirsty for liquid, the infrastructure project kept filling it with rubble and later concrete. The construction of a modern city began on shaky ground.