194 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
projects within the city, which included the Cathedral, San
Francisco, Santo Domingo, San Agustín, and Cortés’s pal-
aces, as well as palaces for other Spanish residents. And
when devoting labor to the waterworks was unavoidable, as
it would become in 1555, the Spanish cabildo avoided pay-
ing for it, pushing responsibility for the waterworks onto
the already overburdened backs of native rulers.
Another reason for the neglect can be traced to the con-
quistadores’ Spanish birthright: Cortés and most of his
men were from the bleached plains of Extremadura, where
occasional stands of live oaks clustered together against the
throbbing summer sun. To them, Tenochtitlan, a lacustrine
city built to embrace the water, was entirely foreign. As
Richard Boyer has argued, the Spaniards imported not
only their customs but also their cultural landscape into
the Valley of Mexico and attempted to re-create their dry
homeland there. 12 By midcentury, the first of many proj-
ects to dry up the city had been proposed in the Spanish
cabildo; the process would take centuries, but by the begin-
ning of the twentieth, the lakes would be largely gone.
Their own deadly experience with the city’s lakes and
canals during the wars of conquest, described in chap-
ter 4, helped set the stage for later Spanish hostility to
the surrounding lakes. As a result, in the decades after
the Conquest, the Spanish government’s concerns about
water were closely linked to its worries about indigenous
insurrection. For instance, in 1537, to enhance the security
of the city, Viceroy Mendoza proposed that the city be
walled and that the Tacuba causeway be widened and a
fort built at its entrance. Part of the goal of this ambitious
proposal, were it carried out, was to transform the city’s
relationship with the surrounding water, and it reveals the
startling blindness of Spanish officials to the necessary
coexistence of city and lake. Indigenous residents were to
be cleared from a band of land around the city (presum-
ably the laguna, which was a source of agricultural water
as well as an absorptive area for flood prevention), and this
would be leveled and filled; all the canals that ran through
the city (and carried the water out during the rainy season,
thus preventing floods) would be filled, except for two or
three, which would be lined with mortared stone (thereby
reducing their absorptive capacity). In the wake of the Chi-
chimec rebellion, which began in 1540, and the ensuing
Mixtón war, Spanish fears of an indigenous uprising grew
more acute. In April of 1541, the viceroy and the cabildo
went into high gear to protect the city from indigenous
insurrection, retrofitting two palaces in the city so that
women and children could take shelter in them. They also
extended the street that passed by San Francisco so that
it reached the western lakeshore, thus providing another
exit from the city. 13 A year later, in May 1542, the cabildo
was planning to build a fortress at Chapultepec, openly
recognizing the tactical disadvantage it faced when having
to fight on the island city rather than on the dry land of
the lakeshore. By 1545, the cabildo was fielding a radical
proposal to clear the city’s entrance and exit to the city by
filling in a huge swath of the laguna, everything that lay
between the causeway running from Tlatelolco to Tacuba
on the north, to the causeway of San Juan, which ran by
the Tianguis of Mexico toward Chapultepec (figure 9.2). 14
The proposal makes two points clear. First, the Spanish
failed to recognize that the surrounding swampy areas in
the laguna and the lake, which could capture, hold, and
absorb rain water and runoff, were the city’s best protec-
tion from floods. Second, water levels were indeed low
through the 1540s as the result of a great drought; oth-
erwise, such a proposal would have hardly been feasible,
nor would the apparent ease with which Spanish officials
could build roads to run across the western laguna. 15
Cultural attitudes made themselves felt in the vast cam-
paign of building that the Spaniards sponsored in the city,
and these too had unprecedented impact on the surround-
ing lakes. In order to support the foundations of their new
stone churches and houses, Spanish builders used wooden
pilings to compensate for the swampy subsoil, thereby
creating ceaseless demand for wooden beams—it was not
untypical for the cabildo to allow the harvesting of hun-
dreds of wooden beams from the surrounding forests so
the conquistadores could build their houses. Already by
1533, the cabildo was moving against the illicit cutting of
wood, so deforestation had proceeded rapidly. 16 In addi-
tion, the conversion of grasslands to pasture for the cattle,
sheep, and goats that the Spaniards brought into a land
with no native ruminants led to erosion. The stripping of
forests and grasslands dramatically decreased the absorp-
tive capacity of these lands. Thus, when the rainy season
came, rain waters poured into the lakes with increasing
violence. The natural world was an increasingly fearsome
place, and the residents of Mexico City knew it.
In the sections that follow, we will first look at two
related problems: increasing the city’s freshwater supply
and the colonial rebuilding of the dike system. I will begin
by sketching out the systemic problems that caused a ter-
rible shortage of freshwater in the city and then turn to