198 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
Santa Fe’s water was highly regarded as being clean and
healthful, it lay beyond Chapultepec to the west. This land
was initially not under the city’s control, instead being the
domain of the powerful priest Vasco de Quiroga, who had
founded in 1532 an indigenous community based on ideas
of Thomas More’s Utopia and who was initially unwilling to
allow Mexico City’s long reach into his protected domain. 29
Moreover, powerful landholders and mill owners (among
them the Cortés family and the judge Lorenzo de Tejada,
the same judge who owned the shops and arcades in the
tianguis) held or had held lands in this area, and the cabildo
was unwilling to disrupt their valuable water supplies. 30
In light of the high political costs of such a waterwork,
the cabildo decided to pursue a second project. By August
of 1564, the cabildo was considering tapping the springs of
Acuecuexco, near Churubusco (the colonial-period bas-
tardization of the name Huitzilopochco) to the south of
the city. This new project, called the Churubusco aqueduct,
was in fact a very old one, because it entailed drawing on
the springs that had once been tapped to provision the city
under Ahuitzotl, in 1499. But as described in chapter 3, the
springs were so abundant that their water began to flood
the Mexica city, and Ahuitzotl ordered that the collector
be dismantled. (This was not the first planned revival of
the Mexica aqueduct; a similar project had been proposed
and then abandoned in 1527.) 31 In the intervening years, the
conduit into the city that had once run along the causeway
of Ixtapalapa had fallen into disrepair.
In 1564, the city’s builders calculated, as had the Mexica
before them, that in order to reach the city anew, the water
from the springs would need to fill a collector that would
create enough pressure to force the water to go down the
Ixtapalapa causeway and to enter the city from the south,
following the route of the Acuecuexco aqueduct. The
springs lay a little over five miles from the Plaza Mayor,
requiring a shorter distance for the water to travel and mak-
ing the Churubusco project more feasible than bringing
water from distant Santa Fe. Clearly the amount of water
in the springs was still abundant, as noted by some of the
architects brought in to evaluate the plan, who also added
that other nearby springs could supplement the water sup-
ply to the collector, should this one prove insufficient. 32
In addition, the project was supported by Gerónimo de
Valderrama, who virtually led the government after the
death of Viceroy Luis de Velasco in July 1565 had left New
Spain without its traditional head. Valderrama lent the
cabildo the necessary 1,000 pesos to pay for the oil and rope
it needed to import from Spain for the waterworks, which
arrived in September of 1566. 33
By April 1565, the project had progressed to the point of
the construction of a large collection tank in Churubusco,
made of thick masonry to withstand the pressure of the
water contained in it. Momentum continued when the new
(and briefly serving) viceroy, Gastón de Peralta, threw his
support behind the project, agreeing to allocate the sisa de
carne toward the costs of the new aqueduct and fountain
in January of 1567. 34 But there was an underlying unease
about the project, revealed by the number of times the
cabildo dispatched its experts to measure and re-measure
the grade and the force of the water. At least one cabildo
member was concerned about the overall stability of the
ground for such a project, as well as its ability to withstand
the seismic tremors that were frequent in Mexico City. 35
So it is not entirely surprising that when Viceroy Martín
Enríquez arrived in November 1568, he put the brakes on
the project, asking for yet another study to be carried out
shortly after his arrival. In May of 1570, he ordered that still
another measurement of the water’s force be taken. 36 Evi-
dently, this round of measurement failed to convince him
of the aqueduct’s plausibility, because by the end of 1571, he
had turned the government’s attention toward Santa Fe as
the most likely source for the city’s water. 37
The attempt to bring water from Santa Fe consumed
the attention of the city’s builders as well as its tax rev-
enue through much of the early 1570s, a project admirably
chronicled by Raquel Pineda Mendoza. 38 The plan was
to set the aqueduct atop an enormous arcade that would
carry the water from the springs of Santa Fe and nearby
Cuajimilpa toward Chapultepec, where the water would
flow into the already constructed eastern aqueduct that
ran along the Tacuba causeway, thus saving the expense of
a new system of arteries to feed the city. But the inexperi-
ence of the builders led to an unmitigated disaster. While
the city spent 27,855 pesos and 5 grams of gold on tools and
materials, much of it from the sisa de vino, diverting lime
to the project (which halted other construction works), it
was wasted money. In February of 1573, a commission sent
out by the cabildo discovered that the slope that the arcade
provided to the aqueduct had been badly calculated, so
that water backed up and overflowed its course en route,
and more than fifty arches were badly aligned. 39 A nasty
lawsuit ensued, as the cabildo went after Miguel Martínez,
one of the maestros, or experts, of the project, impounding
his goods and throwing him in jail. 40 Thus the second great