Islands in the Lake: Environment and Ethnohistory in Xochimilco, New Spain by Richard M. Conway

Abstract

The canals and chinampas (raised fields) of Xochimilco are the last substantial remnant of the extraordinary wetland agricultural system that fed Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica Empire, and Mexico City, the seat of power for the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Inscribed as a unesco World Heritage site in 1987, a portion of Xochimilco has enjoyed a degree of protection from development unparalleled in the region, but its complex and remarkable history has remained relatively unknown. In Islands in the Lake, Conway brings this rich history to light through a careful and comprehensive study of the Spanish and Nahuatl documents produced in and around Xochimilco from the 1540s to the 1790s.Islands in the Lake provides a detailed account of Xochimilco’s political and social organization, land tenure, demography, and economy during the colonial era. Conway argues that Xochimilco persisted in the ways that it did because “the lakes, and the ways local residents modified and used them, acted as a buffer against the disruptions of Spanish rule” (15). The first chapter establishes the ecological and political histories of Xochimilco, with close attention to the fifteenth-century origins of the chinampas and how local leaders adjusted to the demographic, economic, and ecological crises of the sixteenth century. The second chapter documents the conspicuous absence of outsiders among the chinampas in the sixteenth century, though the Xochimilca were far from isolated; they experimented with non-native crops and maintained strong ties to the markets in Mexico City. In the third chapter, Conway shows how canoes, causeways, and canals promoted commerce and supported Indigenous artisans, porters, inns, wharves, warehouses, and merchants, as well as resellers, thieves, and dealers in stolen goods.Chapters four and five focuses on how disease (for which the lakes offered no buffer) and increasing climate instability in the seventeenth century created conditions ripe for exploitation as a new generation of Nahua leaders sought to acquire and maintain power. Chapter six focuses on the eighteenth-century incursions into Xochimilco by Spanish hacienda owners who expanded their pastures into the lake and by engineers who blocked the lake to protect Mexico City from flooding. These disruptions of local hydrology combined with a period of particularly wet years to cause catastrophic flooding on the eve of Mexican independence. The final chapter focuses on the continuity of Nahuatl document production in Xochimilco and its eventually decline in tandem with the political, economic, and climate disruptions of the late eighteenth centuryIslands in the Lake is a valuable contribution to the history and ethnohistory of central Mexico that adds an important local perspective to patterns and processes that historians have documented at a regional scale. It benefits from Conway’s inclusion of recent insights from the findings of environmental history, climate science, and disease ecology, and it invites readers from disciplines other than history to pay attention. Archaeologists should see an opportunity to work more closely with historians of Indigenous Mexico. Although Conway uses archaeological sources to establish the Prehispanic roots of Xochimilco (mostly in the first half of the first chapter), future works should consult a rich and growing archaeological and bioarchaeological literature about the urban and rural communities of the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Basin of Mexico.Critical historians will notice the nature of archival production in Xochimilco. For example, gender plays a prominent role in Chapters 2 through 4, in which Conway makes important points about how Indigenous women protected land through wills and testaments, brought revenue into the community as sellers in markets throughout the region, and used marriage alliances to maintain continuity of local leadership. Gendered, and maybe other, disparities of record keeping, are worth investigating (perhaps in conversations with historical archaeologists). Historical ecologists and political ecologists will find Conway’s environmental-history approach a welcome addition to their studies of the recursive relationships of humans and their environments in the Basin of Mexico and beyond.