waTeR and The sacRed ciTy • 27footprints that lead from his landing place show that he
travels to a hill with a curved top, and they pass below a
date, 1 Flint, in a rectangular cartouche. Within the hill,
the unnamed rower will encounter Huitzilopochtli, who
is shown as a profile face wearing a hummingbird head-
dress within a three-sided enclosure of bundled reeds. The
speech scrolls shaped like little candy-canes that emerge
from above Huitzilopochtli indicate that he is command-
ing the Mexica, and the footsteps that lead out of his shrine
toward the right edge of the page signal the long migra-
tion the Mexica are about to undertake, one that will lead
them out of Aztlan. Note the representation of Aztlan as
an island settlement surrounded by a circular lake, which
reflects how the Mexica conceived their place of origin. It
also provided a template for the city of Tenochtitlan, which
they would build at the end of their journey—as this repre-
sentation of space impressed itself upon lived space.
The unusual watery environment of the valley within
which Tenochtitlan was built and the means of control-
ling it have been a source of wonder and puzzlement in
all its histories, from the letters of Hernando Cortés, who
described it as “built on a salt lake” that “rises and falls with
its tides as does the sea,” 3 to the writings of Karl Wittfogel,
who saw the waterworks as the key to understanding the
Mexica state. In his Oriental Despotism, he argued that the
leaders who masterminded massive feats of environmen-
tal engineering were “uniquely prepared to wield supreme
political power”; within such societies, he argued, lay the
precursors of the twentieth-century totalitarian state. It
was Wittfogel who pointed out the close relation between
the conquest state and the hydraulic state, as “organized
control over the bulk of the population in times of peace
gives the government extraordinary opportunities for coor-
dinated mass action in times of war.” 4
Centuries earlier, the Mexica themselves made a similar
linkage, twisting together the glyphs for “stream of water”
(atl) and “burnt thing” (tlachinolli), which refers to the out-
come of warfare, into a single symbol. This opposition is
the kind that Nahuatl speakers were so fond of in their
literary tradition, called in Spanish a difrasismo, or doubled
phrase. It is explained in the dictionary of the Nahuatl lan-
guage compiled by the Franciscan Alonso de Molina and
published in 1571. He tells us that the couplet atl, tlachinolli
is a metaphor for “battle or war” (as is another paired cou-
plet, “arrow, shield” [mitl, chimalli]). 5 While many scholars
have looked to one side of the atl, tlachinolli couplet with
studies of Aztec warfare, it is surprising that no one has
turned attention to the place of water in representations
of pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan. This chapter does so. To
consider the interplay between those spheres of represen-
tation and lived space, it sets representations of the watery
environs of Tenochtitlan, to be found in both images and
texts, alongside a discussion of the engineering feats that
brought the city into being. It argues that water—often
shown as a violent or unruly woman—was an enduring
trope in representations, and by the end of the fifteenth
century, it was shown to be defeated or mollified by the
ruler of the altepetl of Tenochtitlan. At the same time, the
construction of waterworks linked to rulers carried these
ideas into the lived spaces of the city. Wittfogel argued
for the worldwide similarities between what he termed
“hydraulic societies,” be they in China, India, or the Valley
of Mexico, a broad-brush picture. Here, we will see how,
in fact, ideologies of both water and the ruler, and the link-
ages between them, were products of a unique time and
place, and in later chapters, we will see how the historical
endurance of the linkage between the control of water and
the indigenous ruler carried into the colonial period.waTeR and TeOTL
By the thirteenth century, according to the Tira de la Pere-
grinación and other histories, the Mexica had reached the
valley. Tenochtitlan, the city that they would transform
into one of the greatest metropolises of the world, began,
as archeology has revealed, as little more than a series of
low-lying atolls in the shallow and swampy saltwater of
Lake Tetzcoco, bearing only the slightest resemblance to
the ideal of Aztlan. By the fifteenth century, a new Az tlan
had been created: the work of human hands, it had been
wrested from the surging waters of the surrounding
lakes, as generation after generation of Mexica scooped
up lakebed mud and tramped to higher ground with their
loads, building up the dry land, basketful by basketful,
into the verdant island. These quotidian actions would be
registered in the Nahuatl description of the city as cem
anahuac tenochca tlalpan, the “water-ringed land of the
Tenochca peoples.” 6
The Tira de la Peregrinación shows the special status
of those called out from Aztlan by showing their election
by the calls of Huitzilopochtli. And to those who lived in
the city modeled on Aztlan, proof of Tenochtitlan’s special
status was embedded in the material reality of the city,
from the measured flow of waters through the capillaries of