inTRoducTion • 23special section of albino animals; his aviary, which may have
occupied an enormous city block; his “house of women,”
presumably housing the overflow from his palace of sec-
ondary wives, concubines, and their children. Instead, the
station “Moctezuma” marks what was once the water’s edge,
the limits of his watery city, created through spectacular
engineering feats of this ruler and his predecessors.
Along the same metro line where this station is set, two
other stations with similar connections to the extensive
manipulation of the aquatic environment are to be found:
Chapultepec and Pantitlan. On our imagined timeline
made of metro stations, these would be the second and
third. (The first would be Copilco, a rocky volcanic outcrop
in the southern valley that was settled as early as 800 bce.)
When the future city was little more than nubs of high
ground in the middle of a vast, shallow, salty lake measur-
ing some forty miles north to south, within the enormous
volcano-ringed basin that we know as the Valley of Mexico,
Chapultepec was a solid hill that rose at its western littoral
(figure 1.1). Visible for miles around, it was a life-giving
place, its rocky outcrops dripping and oozing with fresh-
water, the unstoppable gift of internal springs, the physical
embodiment of altepetl, water hill. Probably around the
eleventh century, that group of nomadic Nahuatl-speakers
who called themselves the Mexica had come into the valley,
and they first settled here, in Chapultepec. By the thir-
teenth century, they had moved from the shore and were
occupying the outcrops in the middle of the salty lake, and
later enshrined the year 1325 as that of their city’s founda-
tion. By the middle of the fifteenth century, they headed
a large tribute state. Despite their military and economic
successes, the Mexica in their island city remained per-
petually tethered to Chapultepec, the site of their early
settlement across the lake, as they were dependent upon
its freshwater, which they carried across the lake via an
ingenious system of double aqueducts. Early emperors had
their portraits carved on the rocky outcrops of the hill, and
today, vestiges of the portrait of the last Mexica emperor,
Moteuczoma, carved directly into the live rock, are still
visible. Chapultepec’s life-giving water would provision the
city until the nineteenth century.
Chapultepec was the place where tamed, potable water
was available to the island’s residents, and if we travel along
the same metro line in the other direction, past the “Moc-
tezuma” station, we arrive at “Pantitlan,” and we encounter
water’s other face. The great salt lake that surrounded the
city was seasonally fickle; technically speaking, it was an
inland sea, with no natural outlets. During the summer
rainy season, torrential rains in the valley and surround-
ing mountains would pour into the lake; then this swollen
monster would threaten to engulf the island city. During
the winter dry season, lake levels would drop precipitously,
suturing the flow into vital arteries of canals that criss-
crossed the valley and allowed provisioning canoes to reach
large urban populations. Pantitlan was a site in the middle
of the lake, and it seemed to be a concentrated microcosm
of the lake’s temperamental ebbs and flows. The large, shal-
low canoes that plied the lake would avoid it because even
on calm, sunny days, when the lake surface could glisten
like a mirror, Pantitlan could generate enormous waves
that would swallow a boat and its crew. At other times, it
seemed to turn into a great drain, generating a huge whirl-
pool that could suck boats and men down to the depths.
The Mexica emperors were eager to mitigate its effects,
and so they closely attended to the water deities ultimately
responsible for such calamities. Their high priests went to
Pantitlan like ambassadors on one of the religious feast
days that fell early in the year. During the month of Atlca-
hualo, they headed out in canoes to Pantitlan to negotiate
a favorable relationship with the needy and powerful water
deities with offerings of food and vessels. Also included in
the gifts to the deities were young children, carefully cho-
sen for the sacrifice. Decorated with jade jewelry that was
green, the color of new life, the children were like maize
kernels that needed to be buried to ensure the sustenance
of all. Throats slit, their small and precious bodies were
gently committed into Pantitlan’s watery depths. 45
Thus even the map of the city’s great metro system,
that hallmark of the city’s modernity, carries us, riders and
readers, back to the past. Our voyage through the metro
has allowed us to glimpse two principal themes of this
book, seen as if from the windows of the train speeding in
dark tunnels: the figures of the indigenous Mexica mon-
archs (“Moctezuma,” “Cuitlahuac,” and “Cuauhtemoc”)
and the city’s relationship with its watery environment
(“Chapultepec” and “Pantitlan”). The book’s chapters are
arranged in rough chronological order, beginning in the
fifteenth century in chapter 2, “Water and the Sacred City,”
to explore the city as it was created and engineered by the
Mexica, who took the rocky outcropping in the middle of
a shallow lake and transformed it over generations into
a densely built island city; as we shall see, they not only
engineered the environment, but also articulated their
feats of environmental control in their representations of