waTeR and aLTePeTL in The LaTe sixTeenTh-cenTuRy ciTy • 197the west and gradually sluicing out the salt (see figure 2.7).
The laguna was not sweet enough for drinking, but it
was sufficient for irrigation, as evidenced by the number
of chinampas in the city that availed themselves of water
from the canals. Instead of following indigenous precedent,
maintaining a sweet laguna and using its water that flowed
into the city’s canals as irrigation water, the city’s Span-
ish residents instead used valuable drinking water from
Chapultepec for irrigation and for other low purposes.
For instance, city residents were known to wash animals
and their clothes with water from the Chapultepec aque-
duct. 20 In 1598, the Dominicans who staffed the Inquisi-
tion complained that their well water had given out, so
they requested a supply of water from the pipes bringing
freshwater in from Chapultepec so that they could clean
out prison cells. 21 Moreover, city residents were often
incautious about maintaining the cleanliness of the canals,
and their treatment of the canals as open sewers rendered
them further unfit for irrigation or the vast range of uses
to which nonpotable water could be put. This situation is
abundantly attested to in the actas, and a few examples will
suffice to make the larger point. In one of its early dictates
notable for its sangfroid, from 1527, the Spanish cabildo
banned dumping dead animals in the canals, as well as dead
Indians—a prohibition clearly meant to address an existing
problem. In another telling instance, the cabildo granted a
lot to a tanner along a canal running into the city. Tanneries
around the world are notorious for both their foul odor
and the noxious liquids they emit (a by-product of the
decomposition of the hides and the substances—lye, urine,
dung—used to preserve them); this canal flowed directly
into the urban core, entering near the Tianguis of Mexico,
carrying its fetid contents into the heart of the indigenous
city. 22 Slaughterhouses were also a source of foul odor and
contamination, and they were situated on canals, with the
flow used to dispose of blood and feces. 23 Thus the water
that once had some agricultural use was quickly polluted,
and the city was ever more dependent upon the limited
supply of freshwater coming in from the Chapultepec canal
as well as any available well water.
By the 1560s, the crisis in the supply of freshwater had
reached new proportions, and, rather than working to
restore the laguna as a source of agricultural and nonpo-
table water, the city’s Spanish government responded by
seeking new freshwater sources to supply the city. From
the Conquest until this point, all of Mexico City’s fresh-
water had come from a large collector built at the base of
the springs of Chapultepec. As we saw in chapter 3, a weir
that lay between two low-lying structures regulated the
pre-Hispanic reservoir; the water flowed out from this
structure into an aqueduct that ran along the lakeshore
and then along the causeway of Tacuba to enter the city
(see figure 3.5). The discovery of a large Tlaloc statue near
the pre-Hispanic collector tells of the practical and ritual
nature of this building. While the aqueduct’s pipes had
been destroyed by Cortés during the Conquest, they were
repaired shortly after as part of the early reconstruction
projects of the city. 24 Also early in the colonial period,
another collector was built within the perimeter of the
pre-Hispanic one, with higher walls meant to increase the
pressure of the water so that it could flow more forcefully
into the aqueduct and thence into the city. The numerous
rebuildings of this collector, each time within the perimeter
of the previous, each time with a smaller area and presum-
ably with higher walls, were meant to keep up the necessary
water pressure to supply the city. 25
When the waters from Chapultepec arrived to the island
along the causeway of Tacuba, a collection point allowed
water porters in canoes to pass by in the canal beneath and
fill ceramic vessels to distribute the water to markets or to
households; this was the same site as a later fountain called
the Tlaxpana, which existed into the nineteenth century.
The water continued onward along the Tacuba causeway
toward the city, arriving at another collection point adja-
cent to the Alameda; at the end of the colonial period, the
elegant fountain here was called la Mariscala. But along
the way into the city, more and more parties clamored for
its use. Beginning in the 1520s, the cabildo had made sig-
nificant grants for orchards along this watery artery, and
these orchard owners had pipes, sometimes legal ones
created with the permission of the cabildo and sometimes
not, to draw water into their valuable crops. The obrero
mayor (overseer of public works) was frequently called in
to repair the clay pipe that would be broken by those wish-
ing to avail themselves of the water inside. 26 By 1532, the
cabildo began prohibitions of drawing irrigation water for
orchards from the Chapultepec pipe. 27
Water problems surfaced more acutely in 1564, when,
in April, the scarcity of water was so great that the cabildo
joined with the judge Villalobos, a member of the Real
Audiencia, to look at the possibility of bringing in water
from the abundant springs of Santa Fe; funding the work
was the sisa de carne, the temporary tax imposed for spe-
cial projects like this one, on the sales of meat. 28 While