waTeR and aLTePeTL in The LaTe sixTeenTh-cenTuRy ciTy • 203grudging they were; the Spanish cabildo needed to be prod-
ded by viceregal directive again and again to allocate the
necessary funds. All told, the 44,122 pesos it paid out for
the second Chapultepec aqueduct was double the 27,855
it spent from the sisa funds on the disastrous Santa Fe
project of 1571–1573, and 88 percent of this was specifically
described as payments for the lime alone. 56
Perhaps the best indication of Valeriano’s resolve—and
his ability as a leader—becomes evident when we set the
construction project against its historical backdrop. In June
of 1576, just a year after the aqueduct project began, came
the first report of cocoliztli, a hemorrhagic fever, which had
been the cause of the 1545 epidemic that was blamed on
the foul odors from the lakebed. The city was convulsed
by this second epidemic that would claim about 45 per-
cent of the population during its two-year rampage. 57 The
chronicler Mendieta, who lived in the city then, wrote, “In
the year 1576, another general pestilence arrived, and an
enormous number of people died all over, and it caused a
flow of blood, like the other epidemics, and appeared like
t y p h u s .” 58 His younger colleague, Juan de Torquemada,
may have just arrived in New Spain at the time of this epi-
demic, and it left a vivid picture in his memory:
In the year 1576, under the Viceroy don Martín Enríquez,
the native Indians survived an epidemic and pestilence
that lasted more than a year. It was so great that it almost
ruined and destroyed the whole country, leaving the Indies,
which we call New Spain, nearly depopulated. It was a ter-
rible thing to see the people who died, because the thing
was that some were dead, and others about to die, and no
one had the health or the strength to be able to cure one
or bury another. In the cities and large towns, they opened
great ditches, and from morning to night, the ministers did
nothing else but carry corpses, dump them in, and cover
them with dirt when the sun went down, with none of the
solemnity with which the dead are usually buried, because
there was not enough time and too many corpses. 59The disease almost uniquely infected the indigenous
population, so the stresses we see that increased the impact
of the disease—shortages of freshwater and food, overwork
of the labor force—would have been even more acute after.
Indeed, Chimalpahin reports that this epidemic was fol-
lowed by yet another in 1579: “And this was when there was
a sickness again (blood came from our noses). The sickness
really raged; many people died.” 60 Even within the Spanish
cabildo, whose members were often dismissive of problems
in the native parcialidades, there were calls as late as 1581
to suspend public works until the native population had
fully recovered from the 1576 cocoliztli epidemic, which, of
course, would have stopped work on the new Chapultepec
aqueduct. 61 Mendieta, writing about the effects of plagues,
was amazed at how enduring the Mexican altepetl was, in
describing the response of indigenous peoples in Jalisco.
Unlike other peoples in the world, they did not flee into the
countryside when plague struck, instead staying together
in their altepetl—only within the altepetl would they be
assured a decent burial and not die like animals. 62
The cocoliztli epidemic is reflected in the payments made
by the Spanish cabildo for lime, our only meter at present
of building activity; the project began in July of 1575 with
3,000 pesos of lime, and the next lime payment was not
until January of 1579 (figure 9.4). In this year, the pace of
the project picked up again, and in spite of disease and food
shortages, the aqueduct project went forth. So did another
great indigenous enterprise in the city, the painting of the
Florentine Codex, where the native tlacuiloque shut them-
selves up in the school of Santa Cruz within the monastery
of Santiago Tlatelolco as the plaza outside was trenched to
contain the corpses left in the plague’s wake. 63
The promise of that early summer day in June of 1575
when Valeriano and other elites gathered to deliver their
request to the Spanish cabildo took years to bear fruit, but
nonetheless can be seen in the lithograph of the Trasmonte02,0004,0006,0001,0007,0003,0005,000| 1 ||||||||||| ||| |||||| ||||||
1575 1576| | | | | |
1577 1578 1579 1580 1581 15822341234123412341234123412341234PAYMENTS IN PESOS BY QUARTERfiguRe 9.4. Payments made by the Spanish cabildo of Mexico for lime
for the Chapultepec aqueduct, 1575–1582.