Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental transformation in colonial Mexico City by Vera Candiani

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental transformation in colonial Mexico City by Vera Candiani Stephanie Ballenger Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental transformation in colonial Mexico City By Vera Candiani. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. In the 13 November 2015 issue of The Guardian, Mexico City architect Alberto Kalach describes his vision for the restoration of the lakes that were once the dominant feature of the city's landscape and the foundation of its productive ecosystem. Kalach contends that "the way the city has evolved is basically fighting against its environment."1 This centuries-long battle has had destructive consequences, extending from the city's vanishing supply of potable water to its sinking buildings and the draining and poisoning of its aquifer. Vera Candiani's impressive book details the origins of the crisis Kalach would like to resolve. In an exhaustively detailed study of the Desagüe, as the ambitious engineering project designed to channel water out of the basin was called, she describes how efforts to control flooding and create more land for urban development and Spanish agriculture illustrate the class interests at the heart of Spanish colonialism. While Indigenous hydraulic knowledge and technology had been employed to develop a complex system of locks, canals and causeways, colonizing Spaniards had a different approach to, and different reasons for, removing the basin's water. They also had a different set of concerns when it came to the use and valuation of productive property. The Desagüe was driven by a mercantile and rentier elite's desire to protect the capital's built environment from periodic and unpredictable flooding. Dreaming of Dry Land provides an in-depth account of how this drainage project was carried out, by whom and in whose interests. Candiani argues that this undertaking reveals that Spaniards and Indigenous inhabitants of the lake basin and its hinterlands constituted two distinct social classes whose interests were inimical, rather than overlapping and intersecting. It is a superb piece of scholarship. Based on over ten years of research in twelve archives, this theoretically sophisticated work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of colonial social relations through the prism of engineering, technology and environmental management. Candiani's contributions will be of interest to scholars working in several fields; from urban planning to the history of ideas, she advances a novel approach that requires a re-imagining of Spanish colonialism. Candiani opens with a detailed exposition of where her research fits into a larger body of environmental history and theory, and argues that the distinct ways in which colonizing Spaniards and local Nahuas understood the value and use of water and land had less to do with culture or ethnicity and everything to do with their class position vis à vis ownership and control of productive resources. Her fascinating first chapter details the relationships between Spaniards and Nahuas as they developed throughout the sixteenth century, a period in which Indigenous hydraulic knowledge eroded and Indigenous understandings of the fluidity of land and water came into conflict with Spanish conceptions of land and water as distinct and having discrete properties and measurable values. This conceptual difference shaped social relations between the two groups. Spaniards sought to drain the lakes in order to produce more land for agriculture and urban development, while Nahuas had long managed and adapted to seasonal flooding. Both groups agreed that flooding had to be managed; where they differed was in the nature of that management and whose interests would be best served by diverting massive amounts of water out of the basin. However, Spanish interests became paramount and the project to drain the basin of its excess water began it earnest in 1604. Each subsequent chapter details how the Desagüe's challenges were simultaneously technical, social and political, and how a variety of actors—engineers, colonial officials, religious orders and Indigenous commoners—engaged in relationships both conflictive and cooperative over how the massive drainage works should be constructed. This process involved not simply practical matters, but also involved the meanings and measurements of water and land to be displaced and produced, and how it would be distributed and used. Each succeeding chapter illustrates a new dimension of the Desag...