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Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 36e52

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Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jhg

The debut of ‘modern water’ in early 20th century Mexico City: theXochimilco potable waterworks

Jeffrey M. Banister a and Stacie G. Widdifield b,*

a Southwest Center, School of Geography and Development, Latin American Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USAb School of Art, Latin American Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0002, USA

Abstract

In September 1910, during the Centennial celebration of Mexico’s independence, Mexico City witnessed the inauguration of the Xochimilco PotableWaters Supply Works, marking the debut of ‘modern water’ in the capital. This was a shift from the traditional notion of water as a heterogeneouselement expressive of diverse geographies and histories e waters, that is e to an understanding of water as a placeless, timeless natural substance. Thetransition to modern water and hydraulic control could never be a completed process. Rather, it would continue to evolve in tension with the greatdiversity of hydraulic histories and geographies of Mexico City. Different from most studies that analyze the Xochimilco system in the context ofmodernity, we see it as also a fundamentally visual phenomenon, an interaction among technologies of construction, representation, and access. Thisincludes the architecture, its photographic representation, as well as an 1884 study that set forth the concept of ‘potable waters’ and argued a case forcreating a modern network to deliver it. The Xochimilco works promised a flow as stable as its delivery system and as permanent as its photographicrecord. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies, recent work on the hydrosocial cycle, visual geography, and art history, we explore thesewaterworks’ technologies as a novel but unstable confluence of objects, narratives, people, and places. For all the apparent durability of this network, theXochimilco springs would run dry by the early 1930s. Instead of seeing water, we now see a collection of historical artifacts in the landscape and thearchive.� 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Porfiriato; Mexico City; Water infrastructure; Visuality; Modern water; Hydrosocial; Xochimilco

In September 1910, during the centennial celebration of Mexico’sindependence, Mexico City residents and visitors witnessed theinauguration of a host of modern ‘durable, useful, and beautiful’public works.1 One of these, the new Obras de Provisión de AguasPotables, the Potable Waters SupplyWorks, was useful and durable,and it was certainly deemed beautiful. More concretely, it wasnecessary for ensuring a stable future for the quickly expandingcapital.2 The city’s population, around 369,000 in 1900, had grownto nearly one-half million by 1910. The extant water infrastructurecould hardly keep up.3 Before the new Obras came on line, theinfrastructure had been a patchwork of masonry aqueducts,

* Corresponding author.E-mail address: [email protected].

1 G. García, Crónica Oficial del Primer Centenario de Independencia de México, México, 19General Hospital, the National Post Office, the Ministry of Communication and Public W

2 A. Peñafiel y L. Asiain, Memoria sobre las Aguas Potables de la Capital de México, Sec3 Mexico’s overall population was 13,606,000 and 15,160,000, respectively. J. Lear, Mex

22 (1996) 464.4 Bribiesca, J. L., El Agua Potable en la República Mexicana, Ingeniería Hidráulica en Méx5 S. Abedrop, El Gran Reto del Agua en la Ciudad de Mexico, Ciudad de México, 2012.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.0050305-7488/� 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

wooden sluice-works, canals, public fountains, clay and in somecases metal pipes, and shallow wells.4 Much of this infrastructure,repaired and cobbled together over the years, could be traced as farback as the Spanish colonial period. Mexico City is situated at thelowpoint of a large volcanic basin andwas constructed over a seriesof ancient lakes. Its numerous and complex waterworks servedsimultaneously as a mode of transportation, a source of water forhuman consumption, and as a means of waste disposal.5 Waterquality inmost areas was therefore deplorablee a soupymixture ofhuman and industrial waste e and waterborne disease was quitecommon, particularly in the poorest neighborhoods.

11, 208. Other public works officially inaugurated included: the General Asylum, theorks, and the Seismological Institute.

retaría de Fomento, 1884.ico City: space and class in the Porfirian capital, 1884e1910, Journal of Urban History

ico, Distrito Federal, 1958.

mailto:[email protected]://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.005&domain=pdfwww.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03057488http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jhghttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.005http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.005http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.005

J.M. Banister, S.G. Widdifield / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 36e52 37

Pressured to act, in the early 1880s the Ministry of Development(Secretaría de Fomento) funded a study by a respected scientist,Antonio Peñafiel, to explore the relationship between hydraulicinfrastructure and public health. Subsequently, Ministry officialsused Peñafiel’s study to construct a modern potable network, theObras, combining state-of-the art science, engineering, and mate-rials. By the time of the centennial, most of the network was up andrunning, ready to move water at an unprecedented volume fordelivery into around 12,000 of the city’s formally registered 14,000buildings that were either connected or soon to be drawn into thenew water network.6 Once in operation, the Obras was animpressive spectacle for the public to witness, and scientists andcivic leaders assured centennial celebrants that what they beheldwas indeed the solution to the capital’s historic water woes.

Witnessing the inauguration of the potable waterworks was notmerely a matter of hearing a speech in front of a single building inthe capital, however. Instead, it involved touring the works’different sites and viewingmultiple objects as they were connectedtogether across the countryside. The tour thus traversed space andtime, directing participants to draw connections among the variousparts and to create a total picture of potable water delivery as anintegrated system. The trip took its elite group of visitors outsidethe city proper, moving them away from the political stronghold ofthemetropolitan core and into the hinterlands of Xochimilco, in thesouthernmost part of the Basin of Mexico. The excursion necessi-tated three special trains each with four cars pulled by an engine.These 12 cars were necessary to accommodate the many invitees,among whom was Mexico’s vice president, the ministers ofDevelopment, Foreign Relations, and Communications, as well asforeign ambassadors, special envoys and their staff and their fam-ilies.7 From their open-air carros de verano, they would have a clearview of Xochimilco, the new source of the potable supply, an arearenowned for its lakes and lush springs. The route moved along arailroad line built to transport laborers and material along thenearly 30 km of fully enclosed reinforced-concrete aqueduct nowconnecting Xochimilco to the city. Centennial celebrants saw firsthand the operation of state-of-the-art engineering housed inmultiple, ornately decorated structures. They were also treated tocopies of a small commemorative album, written by the Obras’chief engineer, Manuel Marroquín, describing the technologicalachievement in some detail.

The inauguration of the waterworks was in many respects thepublic debut of what Hamlin, Linton, and others have described as‘modernwater.’ This was a shift from the traditional notion of wateras a heterogeneous element expressive of diverse geographies andhistories e waters, that is e toward an understanding of water as aplaceless, timeless ‘natural’ substance.8 For Mexico City, this sub-stance was clear and pure ‘potable water,’ a new object of techno-logical and political control that the federal government hadinvested a fortune to study, extract, and deliver. Modern potablewater was, however, always much more than a singular substance;it was a simultaneously powerful and unstable nexus of ideas, ob-jects, people, places, politics, and, importantly, of representations.As we suggest here, it was a fundamentally visual phenomenon

6 This information comes from: E. Aréchiga Córdoba, De la Exuberancia al AgotamientoPolítica, Urbanización, y Medio Ambiente-Historia de Xochimilco en el Siglo XX, México, 200Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México, Instituto Mora, 1914.

7 García, Genaro, Crónica Oficial de las Fiestas del Primer Centenario de la Independenci8 D. Gregory, Post-colonialism, in: R.J. Johnston, Derek Gregory, Geraldine Pratt, Mich

Hamlin, ‘Waters or water’? Master narratives in water history and their implications for cThe History of a Modern Abstraction, British Columbia, 2010.

9 On the concept of legibility, see J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes t10 L. Aboites, El Agua de la Nación: Una Historia Política de México (1888e1946), México,City, 1876e1910, Colorado, 2003; Abedrop, El Gran Reto (note 5).

anchored in technologies that embed a tension central tomodernizing projects. On one hand, such technologies are anattempt to render water ‘legible,’ creating a conceptual purificationby which it may seem easily controllable and extractable for theapparently apolitical ends of public health and urban expansion. Onthe other, they reflect the impossibility of fully abstracting waterfrom its diverse social histories and variegated physical geogra-phies.9 Such deterritorialization would thus prove especially diffi-cult given Mexico’s complex hydraulic history and geography,which are profoundly shaped by the volcanic-basin lake complexover which the city is constructed.

Moving through the Obras’ multiple sites along the centennialroute was a physically extracted and figuratively abstracted‘resource,’ an official calculation of quality and quantity that wouldostensibly last into the future, and that required politicallycentralized and scientifically based management. The centennialtour was, therefore, the inauguration of much more than physicalwaterworks.What participants sawwas a nexus of material objects,the terrain they traversed, and of texts claiming the right to waterby federal authorities, both in the landscape as well as in photo-graphs of that landscape. The human eyes of viewers in Mexico Cityproper could at leastmake the pretense of capturing the totality of asingle building. By contrast, only the technological eye e affordedby train travel across the route of the network in the landscape, orthe camera producing multiple views and multiple parts packagedin sequence e could approximate the monumental totality of theXochimilco waterworks. At the same time, it was only through themicroscope that the waters’ purity could be seen and verified.

The scholarly literature tends tounderstandtheprocessofmodernwater in terms of the twomost obvious and fundamental objects anddevelopments that facilitated its debut in 1910 Mexico City: aninfluential publication onwater and public health as well as the newphysical waterworks.10 Rarely does this literature approach ‘moder-nity’ as a fundamentally visual experience, nor does it consider visualrhetoric and its integral importance to processes of environmentalgovernance andpolitics. AntonioPeñafiel’s 1884 report drewa criticaldistinction between a past characterized by colonial water ap-proaches, to which he attributed insalubrity and insecurity, and ahealthy and more secure future made so by the advent of modernpotable water. Marroquín’s infrastructure, meanwhile, wouldcollapse the space between the distant source, Xochimilco’s springs,and the capital. How Peñafiel wrote about water and what Marro-quín’s infrastructure looked like worked together to condense adiverse array of elements into a unifying vision of the capital’s social-hydraulic transformation and of its future urban geography.

Crucial also was the commemoration of the state-of-the-art de-livery networkmade possible by the eyewitnesses of the centennialtour and the photographic album. The train trip allowed visitors tosee a new hydraulic landscape while the camera froze multiplepoints in that landscape into the neat package of a souvenir album.The transitory nature of waters was therefore apparently fixed inplace and time by the new technologies of infrastructure and rep-resentation, as if to suggest that water would always flow into thecity, forever available, by means that were ‘durable, useful, and

: Xochimilco y el Agua, 1882e2004, in: M.E. Terrones López (Ed), A la Orilla del Agua:4; and from: M. Marroquín y Rivera, Memoria Descriptiva de las Obras de Provisión de

a de México, Talleres del Museo Nacional, Mexico, 1911, 213.ael Watts (Eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, Blackwell, 2000, 612e615; C.ontemporary water theory, Water Policy 2 (2000) 313e325; J. Linton,What is Water?

o Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale, 1998.1998; C. Agostoni, Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico

J.M. Banister, S.G. Widdifield / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 36e5238

beautiful.’ But while officials claimed to have found the source ofwater toensure the city’s future, theymayalsobe seen as celebratingthe consummation of centralized hydropower.

In this paper, we examine Peñafiel’s study, the Xochimilcowaterworks, and the visuality of modernwater as integrative to thisprocess of political centralization taking place during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and focused intenselyon Mexico City. This was a time during which Mexican political andsocial life was largely dominated by the dictatorship of PorfirioDíaz, a period known as the Porfiriato lasting nearly three decades(1876e1911), ending shortly after the outbreak of the MexicanRevolution in 1910, and Díaz’s exile in 1911. The theoreticalframework through which we have approached representation inhydraulic governance draws from environmental geography, po-litical ecology, art history, and the field of science and technologystudies (STS). We use this framing to demonstrate how even aquintessentially modern water control project such as the Obras edeveloped using the latest scientific advances and engineeringtechnologies, and backed by the full flexing of federal political andfinancial muscle e was a tense articulation of contradictory socio-natural and socio-technological processes and objects.

Central to persuading the broader public of the need for andbenefits of Mexico City’s new hydraulic control technologies was amodern visual rhetoric. This rhetoric, we suggest, was integral tothe governance of water resources, whether in the eclectic archi-tectural styles of the Xochimilco pump houses or in the discourse of‘potable water.’ It was at one and the same time a crucial part of themodern infrastructure itself and also crucial to its constitution as alarger nexus of socio-technological objects and sites of water con-trol. Such rhetoric, moreover, revealed a range of assumptions andideals about space and society, which, in turn, were renderedconcrete within the infrastructure. Therefore, when we ask, howcanwe see the relationship between humans and water, we are alsoasking, by what means and in what ways are humans persuaded tosee ‘water,’ including thework it performs, in society? In the case ofthe Obras, such means include a corpus of interacting objects, textsand sites of water control that would physically link the city to anexploited hinterland, while discursively keeping them separate intime and across the space of the basin.

Yet, the Obras was not a fully accomplished project that created,once and for all, a modern water ‘system’ or ‘solution.’ Instead, itwas a network that brought together objects, people and places innovel ways, requiring a particular historicized vision of a troubledhydraulic-social past and problematic hydraulic geography setagainst a program for a secure future. That future never came,however, for the Obras depleted the springs and dramaticallytransformed Xochimilco’s once lush lacustrine environment in lessthan two decades. As even the Obras’ title suggests, there couldnever be a singular ‘potable water’ for the growing capital, onlymany ‘waters.’ Significant elements of the network of modernwaterworks inaugurated at the centennial, including fragments ofthe original Obras, endure in Mexico City’s present-day water-

11 Linton, Water (note 8), 20; see Aboites, El Agua (note 10), for other cities in Mexictwentieth century.12 On the Croton and Marathon systems, see: Bone, Kevin, (Ed)Water-Works. The ArchiteLiquid Assets. A History of New York’s Water System, New York, 1999; M. Kaika, Damsimagination and materiality, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (200between American and Greek engineers, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers13 S. Guzmán, ‘Se pierde en fugas 35% de agua potable,’ El Universal 25 May 2012.14 The Xochimilco Obras cost nearly 18 million pesos by the time they were finished, ande las aguas, in: Hira de Gortari Rabiela and Regina Hernández (Eds), Memoria y EncuentFederal y Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 1988. For a discussion oBiography of Mexico City, Random House, 1988; for analysis of Mexico City’s exploitative aCiudad de México y Su Impacto Socio-Ambiental, 1880e1990, Instituto Mora; also see, P. Rowater-related hazards and vulnerabilities, Environment and Urbanization 22 (2010) 157e

control structure, revealing hydraulic modernity to be a stratig-raphy of ongoing and connected approaches. Those many anddiverse waters today come from both within and far outside of theBasin of Mexico.

Linton describes the transition toward ‘modernwater’ as having‘taken place throughout the industrialized world by the end of thenineteenth century,’ a categorization which typically excludesMexico.11 The Obras, however, in many ways exemplify the hy-draulic megaprojects under construction that Linton and others seeas one of the major indices of modern water in the ‘industrializedworld.’ Such projects were built to simultaneously address majorurban water provision and hygiene problems, and to demonstratethe advent of modernity in their respective metropoles. This dualfunction is illustrated quite well, for example, by the CrotonAqueduct, which was completed in 1906 to supply New York City,and by the Marathon Dam, completed in 1925 to bring water toAthens, Greece.12 The ‘moment of delivery’ of water into these citiestook place in spectacular fountains or reservoirs, symbolically andperpetually inaugurating the entrance into modernity. And like theObras, both the Croton and Marathon systems traversed largeswaths of terrain, creating new hydraulic landscapes betweenwater source and delivery site. Yet, even if the Xochimilco project isone amongmanyworldwide, it also had to respond toMexico City’scomplex hydraulic situation.

A history of Mexico City’s complicated water situation

The Mexico City metropolitan area and larger Federal Districttoday cover much of the Basin of Mexico. Elevations start at2,200 m on the basin floor and reach 5,000 m at the peaks of thevolcanic mountains forming its perimeter. This is a convergencezone of intense hydraulic and seismic activity, bringing togethertropical latitudes, temperate altitudes, active volcanoes, and faultlines. Some parts of the metropolitan area might experiencewater shortages and rationing while others reel from damagingfloods. Over the years, earthquakes have rearranged whole partsof the drainage and potable infrastructure, and estimates suggestthat water lost to leaks in the network might be as much as 35%,or over 11,000 of a total 32,000 cubic liters-per-second of flow.13

Scarcity and superabundance have always been the Janus face ofwater control projects and politics here, with each humanintervention in the hydraulic landscape seeming to necessitateyet another of grander scale. The Xochimilco Obras acceleratedthis cycle, opening the door to increasingly larger water-provision projects, including widely contested inter-basin trans-fer schemes, starting in the 1950s. Similarly, it set in place thejuridical and physical infrastructure that would make the cityincreasingly dependent on groundwater exploitation. Becausethis is the seat of national political and economic power, officialshave spared little expense to bring to fruition some of the largestand most socially costly water control efforts in the world.14 By1913, when Xochimilco was fully operational, the total costs had

o that were developing or that already had modern water structures by the early

cture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply, New York, 2006; D. Galusha,as symbols of modernization: the urbanization of nature between geographical

6) 276e301; and G. Mavrogonatou and K. Chatzis, Marathon dam: a collaborationFebruary 2013, 13e24.

enormous some for that time. The figure comes from: J. L. Cossío, El entubamientoros: La Ciudad de México y El Distrito Federal (1824e1928), Departamento del Distritof the dominance of Mexico City in national finances, see J. Kandell, La Capital: Thend highly inequitable hydrosocial order, see: P. Romero Lankao, Obra Hidráulica en lamero Lankao, Water in Mexico City: what will climate change bring to its history of179.


reached close to 19 million pesos. In today’s U.S. dollars thiswould be nearly 250 million.15

Developing reliable water solutions for what is today a ‘mega-city’ of 21 million people has proved elusive since the fourteenthcentury, when pre-Hispanic forerunners of the Aztecs, the Mexica,founded their city-state of Tenochtitlán on an island in middle ofLake Texcoco.16 Texcoco was one of five ancient lakes runningthrough the largest volcanic basin on Mexico’s temperate centralplateau. It was there in 1521 that the Spaniards established theircolonial capital of New Spain, La Ciudad de México. As much of thehistorical literature points out, in myth, popular lore, and urbanhistoriography Tenochtitlán (later, Mexico City) became virtuallysynonymous with its hydraulic foundation. It has often beendescribed and pictured as a magnificent city on a lake surroundedby a sprawling network of arroyos, acequias, aqueducts, and canals,as well as countless springs, marshes, and wetlands.17 The city hasconsumed more and more of this watery geography as it continuesto expand outward. Nonetheless, for centuries surface water con-nected people, places and processes across the great expanse of theBasin of Mexico.18 Contact with it in a variety of forms was an un-avoidable feature of everyday life.

With the city under Spanish rule by 1521, many of the earliestprojects were focused on controlling the seasonal ebb and flow ofwater in the lakes. During the rainy season, too much water couldleave locals battling floodwaters at their doorsteps. The drymonths, by contrast, were often marked by the stench of desiccatedaquatic life left exposed on the salt flats of Lake Texcoco, at the city’seastern edge. A lackluster rainy season could make transportationby boat quite difficult, reduce harvests, and leave the city thirsty. Toremedy the situation, in 1607 colonial officials initiated a project totunnel through the mountains to the far north of the basin as a wayto drain the lakes, check against flooding, and to generally modu-late water levels. This feat of human ingenuity and labor, ultimatelyknown as the Gran Canal de Desagüe (Great Drainage Canal), wasnot fully completed until 1900.19

As Manuel Perló Cohen has written, the Desagüe produced ‘along and deep scar on the geography of the Valley of Mexico,’ andin many respects represented a Faustian bargain with hydrology.The negative socio-environmental effects of lake drainage wouldbecome clearer as time went on.20 Now, water moving into thecity as ‘waste’ e either metabolized by humans or flowing asstorm runoff e could be flushed out of the basin entirely. Bydraining part of the lakes and redirecting runoff, the Desagüedramatically altered historical relationships between humans and

15 Total project costs are cited in Bribiesca, El Agua Potable (note 4), 69; The 1913 MexicRates, 1590e1914, London, 2010.16 Population figure comes from the website, World Population Review: http://worldp17 An ‘acequia’ generally refers to an irrigation ditch or canal. An aqueduct can eitherenclosed water pipe. Water carried in aqueducts can also be used for irrigation, but in conalong its course.18 B. Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, Penguin, 1963; I. Del Valle, On shakyHispanic Review (2009) 197e220; M. W. Mathes, ‘To Save a City’: the Desagüe of Mexicprehispánicas en el sistema lacustre del valle de México, in: Carmen Viqueira (Ed), MéReséndiz, Lo Húmedo y lo seco: fronteras y polarización social en la plástica mexicana deEl Paradigma Porfiriano: Ensayo sobre la Construcción del Desagüe del Valle de México, UNimágen cartográfica (1866e1869), Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 98 (20119 Abedrop, El Gran Reto (note 5).20 Perló, El Paradigma (note 18), 13.21 A. Tortolero Villaseñor, Tierra, Agua y Bosques: Historia y Medio Ambiente en el Méxic22 Tortolero Villaseñor, Tierra, Agua (note 21).23 For example, C. Agostoni and E. Speckman Guerra (Eds), Modernidad, Tradición y AltMonuments (note 10).24 Scholars who deal with some aspect of the visual in relation to nineteenth- and twRethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space, and the Modern City, Paris Sewers 83 (2Húmedo y lo seco (note 18); and Salazar, La inundación (note 18).25 Aboites, El Agua (note 10), 185.

the aquatic environment.21 It fixed in the landscape prevailingnotions of ‘nature,’ a particular politics of hydraulic control, and,critically, it strongly determined future water-control possibilitiesand urban development more generally. Efforts to control ‘modernwater’ thus at once constituted an argument against and anintegration of the water solutions that came before. We certainlysee this tension expressed Peñafiel’s study and embodied in theObras themselves, both of which we examine in detail in thefollowing two sections.

Like the Spanish colonial period (1521e1821), then, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries constituted a pivotaltime of transformation for the valley’s urban and hydraulic land-scapes. Before that, the lake environment had provided everythingfrom building materials and fiber to medicinal herbs and basicfoodstuffs, creating the basis for a robust regional economy.Drainage would greatly diminish transportation by boat, which hadlong characterized trade between the city and its southern hinter-land, andwould alter centuries-old networks of foodproduction andprovision for urban residents.22 The contradictions set in motion bythe modern drainage projects have thus understandably garneredsignificant scholarly and popular attention. For example, much hasbeenwritten on the connections between economic transformation,hydraulic politics, and the social effects of infrastructure.23

Historians and geographers have paid far less attention to theother crucial feature, in some ways the antipode, of the city’smodern approach to hydraulics: the Obras de Provisión de AguasPotables. Moreover, research generally has not taken up the matterof how particular visions of water, water control, and infrastructuree the way things look, that is e have informed the political processof creating and stabilizing centralized and exploitative networks ofhydraulic-social control.24 Focusing on the Obras, we suggest thatthree interlinked processes drove hydraulic-landscape trans-formation at the turn of the last century, changes that would ulti-mately remove water from most parts of the urban landscape: 1)the centralization of water governance within federal agencies; 2)the emergence of a modern, scientific-managerialist epistemologyof water control and provision; and 3) new developments intechnology and infrastructure.

On the matter of Mexico’s hydraulic centralization, historianLuis Aboites writes that expanding federal authority in matters ofwater management involved ‘norms that violate and attempt toerase local traditions, superimposing the weight of an external,alien bureaucratic authority [that became..] an inevitable pro-tagonist in local life.’25 A raft of new legislation provided the

an peso to US dollar exchange rate is in Denzel, M. A., Handbook of World Exchange

opulationreview.com/world-cities/mexico-city-population/ (accessed 5/15/2014).be a bridge-like structure made for delivering water over an uneven terrain, or antrast to an acequia, the water in an aqueduct is typically accessible at limited points

ground: hydraulics, state, formation, and colonialism in sixteenth-century Mexico,o-Huehuetoca, 1607, The Americas 26 (1970) 419e38; A. Palerm, Obras hidráulicasxico prehispánico: ensayos sobre evolución y ecología, Conaculta, 1990, 185e443; A.l siglo xix, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciónes Estéticas 83 (2003) 77e98; M. Perló,AM, 1999; C. Salazar, La inundación en el sur de la Cuenca de México a través de la1) 107e153.

o Central, Instituto Mora, 1996.

eridad: La Ciudad de México en el Cambio de Siglo (XIXeXX), UNAM, 2001; Agostoni,

entieth-century waterworks, though not the Xochimilco Obras, include: M. Gandy,004), 363e379; Kaika, Dams as symbols of modernization (note 12); Reséndiz, Lo

http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/mexico-city-population/


juridical means to appropriate water sources by claiming, in thename of federal government, the territory that water flowed over,under, and through. In large part catalyzing the reform process wasthe 1888 law on vías generales de comunicación (loosely, law onboundaries and waterways), which increased the federal govern-ment’s authority and territorial reach. Now, any canal built withfederal funds, and any lake or river that was ‘navigable’ or consti-tuted an international or interstate boundary, could feasibly fallunder federal control and be subject to regulation (though tech-nically, these bodies of water would not be considered federalproperty outright). The navigation criterion constituted a legalwedge for federal intervention, but only rarely was it an actualconcern of regulation.26 With subsequent federal laws in 1894,1902, and 1908, surface water came to be considered a public goodthat could only be secured by a federal concession. Before this time,water use and control had remained mostly within the realm ofcivil law and the remit of municipalities.

Such centralized authority, in other words, came at the expenseof a long tradition of relative local autonomy.27 The newwater lawscoincided with the emergence of the governing unit of the FederalDistrict (DF), created in 1824 but whose authority was consolidatedduring the late nineteenth century. The DF’s power and spatialreach were expanded through promulgation of the 1903 Law ofMunicipal Organization.Whereas ayuntamientos (city councils) hadheretofore been relatively autonomous elected bodies, by the earlytwentieth century, in towns across the valley, they were findingtheir ability to govern curtailed by the new federal structure. ‘Realpower,’ according to John Lear, thus ‘passed into the hands of theSuperior Council... of the Federal District, which consisted of thegovernor, the president of the Council of Public Health, and thedirector of general public works, all offices appointed by PresidentDíaz and funded by the federal government.’28 This move proveddecisive for ensuring potable water and drainage for the city’semerging middle- and upper-class urban developments, especiallysince such modern amenities came at a high social and economiccost for communities elsewhere in the valley who found them-selves lacking political representation.

Tied to the changing legal structure was the emergence of amodern epistemology that posited water as a scientificallycomprehensible and technologically manageable substance, which‘Nature’ had supposedly made available to the city.29 Derek Gregorywrites that the modern discourse of ‘water’ conjured a technicallymanageable natural resource, an approach within which ‘therewould be no place for ‘local’ knowledge.’.30 As it was in manycities throughout the world, discourses of hygiene, bacteriology,and public health included the ideal of clear and clean potablewater, and with delivery infrastructure designed to ensure thispurity. Before this, as Melosi has written, water quality had largelybeen understood through direct observation, and was a matter ofcolor, taste, texture, and place(s) of origin.31 Over time, then, the

26 Aboites, El Agua (note 10).27 Aboites, El Agua (note 10); F.X. Guerra, México: Del Antiguo Régimen a la RevoluciónSouthwest: A Social and Legal History, Arizona, 1996.28 Lear, Mexico City (note 3), 465.29 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2).30 D. Gregory, (Post) Colonialism and the production of nature, in: N. Castree and B. Brow84e111, cited in Linton, Water, 14.31 M. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in American from Colonial Times to32 Hamlin, Waters or water (note 8); Linton, Water (note 8).33 See Linton, Water (note 8), 14, on the connections between the persuasiveness of m34 M. Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century35 J. Budds, Whose scarcity? The hydrosocial cycle and the changing waterscape of LaGeographies: Environment, Meaning, Scale, 2008, 59e68; J. Linton, Is the hydrologic cycleAssociation of American Geographers 98 3 (2008) 630e649; E. Swyngedouw, Social Powe

idea of experiencing water sensually, and as a flow connectingpeople and places, would fade.32

Modern hydraulic thought became especially persuasive andtransformative in Mexico City at the turn of the last century for itssituation within a changing institutional and legal landscape,articulation with new public infrastructure projects, and its popu-larity within politically influential ‘communities of knowledge,’nearly all of which were based in the capital.33 Scientific discourseformed part of an unprecedented and globally networked ‘institu-tional impulse,’ turning the city into one large laboratory fordistilling and tackling the most pressing problems. The eliteSociedad Científica Antonio Alzate constituted a vibrant professionalforum for discussing the issues and for devising solutions to them.Research in statistics, geography, natural history, and anthropology,meanwhile, were receiving direct support from the state. TheSociedadMexicana de Geografía e Estadística (TheMexican Society ofGeography and Statistics) had by the 1890s surveyed much ofMexico’s territory and was regularly publishing maps of the re-public. The National Medical Institute, meanwhile, had opened in1884 to study Mexico’s ‘flora’ as well as its ‘diseases.’ Researchersworking in the areas of hygiene and bacteriology lobbied intenselyfor water control and provision, and supported large-scale publicworks to address the problems of urban growth and development.Indeed, the shelves of the newly revamped museums of archeologyand natural history began to brim with pre-Columbian artifactsunearthed by workers building the city’s new water projects.34

Modernity and antiquity thus issued from the same landscape.

Towards an understanding of modern water

We find recent work in geography and political ecology focused onthe so-called ‘hydrosocial cycle’ useful for exploring the tensionscondensed within the Obras network. Researchers have developedthe hydrosocial cycle concept as away to analyze the relationship ofpolitics to hydrological processes, and to explore the work of waterin sustaining inequality within capitalist social relations. Theirresearch inserts a conception of the social into a typically asocialand apolitical hydrology, and takes seriously the combined idea-tional and material means by which ‘water’ is constituted. Here,water’s materiality (its diverse ‘natures’) is considered inseparablefrom the ‘social’ geographies it traverses, ties together, or forcesapart.35 This research has been deeply informed by the work ofBruno Latour, and the field of science and technology studies (STS)more broadly, in assessing the influence of non-human nature onmodern environmental control efforts and infrastructure. Withinsuch a purview, the Obras cannot be analyzed in terms of discretenatural or social forces. Rather, it is better understood as aconjunction of practices that, in both a parallel and contradictorymotion, efface such distinctions while reflecting an epistemologythat aggressively posits their separation. Following Linton, then, we

, FCE, 1988; Lear, Mexico City (note 3), 454e492; M. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic

n, (Eds), Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics, Massachusetts, Blackwell, 2001,

the Present, 2000; see also, Hamlin, Waters or water (note 8).

odern water and its institutional situation., 2012, 285.Ligua river basin, Chile, in: M. Goodman, M. Boykoff, K. Evered (Eds), Contentioussustainable? A historical-geographical critique of a modern concept, Annals of ther and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power, Oxford, 2004.


view the thought and practice of modernwater as drawing togethera variety of ‘things’ that are neither purely ‘natural’ nor strictly‘social,’ and placing these in tension with discursive maneuversdirected at ensuring that these realms remain distinct.36

On one hand, therefore, we have a modern epistemologicaldivide that creates distinctions e in this case, between so-calledpre-modern and modern approaches, and between bodies, tech-nology, infrastructure, and the urban order. On the other is anontology that collapses them in practice. Over time, as ErikSwyngedouw has argued, modernity has nonetheless come todominate the realm of ontology as well.37 This tension becomesmost pronounced within what Latour calls the process of ‘trans-lation,’ or how modern thought, under the umbrella of a singleconcept, ‘Nature,’ actually condenses ideas, objects and forces thatare ‘simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, andcollective, like society.’38 Such ‘hybrids’ are, strictly speaking,neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural.’ Instead, they are typically unstablenetworks of dissimilar ‘things’ and processes whose connectionsthe modernworldviewwould disavow. Latour in turn refers to sucha disavowal as a work of ‘purification,’ which is necessary forkeeping things, ideas, and realms conceptually separate. One resultof this is that, since the late nineteenth century, we have been facedwith a multitude of hybrids whose function and effects we are illequipped to grasp. Mexico City’s potable water network is a primeexample of this. Heavy groundwater pumping in many places hascaused the city’s substrate to collapse, destroying foundations,causing flooding, and major breaks in the potable network itself.Moreover, bringing water in from ever-greater distances over timebecome increasingly untenable both politically and socially.39

With this in mind, we take modern ‘potable water’ to be aprocess that brought together heterogeneous elements. Thismodern water was showcased at the centennial through a collab-oration of visual conventions and practices, including objects, ar-tifacts, and documents. At that moment, Mexico City’s assortedpoliticians and técnicos working on water control saw themselvesas crossing a threshold from one historical stage to another,enshrining history and geography as they emerged, like the waterthat was to sustain them, facing the future. The scholarship con-cerning turn-of-the-century architecture, urban planning, as wellas the great structural amalgams of modernity and history eworlds’ fairs e points to the interplay between new technologiesand old language.40 This is precisely what we see in the photo-graphic representation and architecture of the Xochimilco Obras, aswell as in Peñafiel’s study. It is not just a matter of building or evenengineering technologies, but of the means by which modernitycould be affirmed and managed through its representation, namelythrough the technology of the photograph and in Peñafiel’s

36 Linton,Water (note 8). See also P. Robbins and B. Marks, Assemblage geographies, in:2010, 176e195.37 Swyngedouw, Social Power (note 35).38 B. Latour, (C. Porter, trans.), We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard (Kindle edition), 139 Aviles, K., Mazahuas denuncian “despojo” del agua ante tribunal latinoamericasection¼sociedad&article¼045n1soc (accessed 8/22/2014).40 See for example: A. Bonnet Correa, La Arquitectura de la Epoca Porfiriana. CuadernKatzman, Arquitectura del Siglo XIX en México, Mexico, 1973; T.F. Reese and C.M. Reese, Reindependence in 1910, Arte, Historia e Identidad en América: Visiones Comparativas, MexModern Nation, Austin, 1996.41 See: J. S. Ackerman, On the Origins of Architectural Photography Study Centre Meackerman-on-the-origins-of-architectural-photography; R. Elwall, Building with Light. TM. Nilsen, Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs. Essays on Reading a CollectDocumenting History, Charting Progress, and Exploring the World, London, 2013; andImagination, London and New York, 2003.42 See Swyngedouw, Social Power (note 35).43 This is not to suggest that the city had no piped water or enclosed drainage. Indeed,pre-independence years. But it was not until the Porfirian period that the city launched itSee Cossío, Memoria y Encuentros (note 14).

research. Multiple studies of architectural photography, particularlyconstruction photography, as well as photographic albums,demonstrate how the use of new visual technologies also collabo-rated to shape modernity, just as they historicized it.41 The displayand picturing of modern water turned pre-modern water e itshistories and geographies e into a relic, replacing it with the idealof an unspoiled, unpopulated and ever-present ‘nature’ there forthe taking.

In sum, the Obras network constituted a nexus of modern sci-entific thought and diverse technologies, yet also brought theseinto tension with historical forms of knowing and seeing, withontologies and epistemologies rooted in the diversity andcomplexity of hydraulic spaces, places and historical practices thatdefined the Basin of Mexico. These modern projects would, overtime, remove water from view both through the desiccation of thesurrounding lakes and the expansion of the underground potablenetwork. Certainly, previous ways of knowing and relating to waterhad little place within the modern view. Nevertheless, they couldnever be erased outright. Just as federal projects de-territorialized,centralized and ultimately rendered water less visible in the land-scape, they also made it visible and geographically situated in newways through this hybrid combination of texts, sites, and objects.42

Setting the stage for modern water’s debut was Antonio Peña-fiel’s influential 1884 study, the first to systematically describeXochimilco as a source of ‘potable water’ and to argue a case for thenew infrastructure that would soon deliver it. We see in Peñafiel anambivalence that would trouble the shift to modern water: waspotable water a sensuous experience and the result of complexhistories and geographies, or a pure substance that would continueto flow in sufficient quantities to secure the capital’s future? Wetake up these questions and this ambiguity in the following section.

Antonio Peñafiel’s study of Xochimilco: from waters to water

Even into the early twentieth century, daily life in the capitalremained attuned to the workings of a flagging water systemwhose primary features were rooted in colonial-period publicworks. Compared to the modern potable network coming on line,large portions of the colonial infrastructure were open to the ele-ments and, as a result, made water a more broadly visible andsensuous part of quotidian existence, most notably in and aroundthe city’s complex of acequias, aqueducts, canals, fountains, andpublic wash areas.43 The old network was exposed to the elementsand was frequently used for dumping toxic substances and mate-rials. This same quality of openness, however, also afforded resi-dents opportunities to see water and, importantly, to perceive itsconnections with the basin’s dramatic hydro-climatic fluctuations.

S. Smith, S. Marston, JP Jones (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Social Geographies, London,

991, location 196.no, La Jornada, 3/19/2006. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/03/19/index.php?

os de Arquitectura y Conservación del Patrimonio Artistico Mexico, January 1980; I.volutionary urban legacies: Porfirio Díaz’s celebrations of the Centennial of Mexicanico 2 (1994) 361e373; and M. Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a

llon Lectures, December 4, 2001 http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/58-james-he International History of Architectural Photography, London and New York, 2004;ion, London, 2011; M. Nilsen, Nineteenth-Century Photographs and Architecture.J. M. Schwartz and J.R. Ryan, Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical

there was a good deal of enclosed infrastructure in place, some which dated to thes large-scale waterworks projects that would replace most of the old infrastructure.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/03/19/index.php?section=sociedad%26article=045n1sochttp://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/03/19/index.php?section=sociedad%26article=045n1sochttp://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/03/19/index.php?section=sociedad%26article=045n1sochttp://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/03/19/index.php?section=sociedad%26article=045n1sochttp://www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/58-james-ackerman-on-the-origins-of-architectural-photographyhttp://www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/58-james-ackerman-on-the-origins-of-architectural-photography


Changes in water clarity and color, for example, were indices ofthese larger processes: winter versus summer rains, flooding ordrought fluctuating industrial water pollution.44 Infrastructureconnected to the two primary sources of fresh water for the city(the springs at Santa Fe and Los Leones), located in the hills to thesouthwest, was open and exposed to runoff and silt, which meantthat water quality was continuously and visibly changing. Officialstudies published around the turn of the last century situated thesesubtle and experiential encounters into a history of pre-modernwater.45 Within this history, the once state-of-the-art colonialinfrastructure that madewater visible and easily accessible becamean artifact signifying contamination and lack of proper control.Similarly, the lakes in the southern end of the basin are representedas another dimension of the city’s water-control problems and are,thereby, conceptually cleaved from the Xochimilco springs and thepeople that depended on them, even though Peñafiel’s study ad-dresses deforestation and its relationship to the springs.

Peñafiel’s Memoria sobre las Aguas Potables de la Capital deMéxico was published by the Ministry of Development in 1884, animportant and at the time influential illustration of the relationshipbetween the emerging epistemology of modern water and thepractices, ideals, and infrastructures that came before.46 The Min-istry commissioned Peñafiel and his team to produce a detailedstudy of the connections between water provision and publichealth. The study effectively certified that the water from Xochi-milco met modern standards of potability, and justified creating asystem for its delivery as a way to ‘save the City of Mexico’ andensure its future. In order to make these claims, Peñafiel and histeam developed a narrative of temporal and spatial differencenecessary for advancing the new project.

Dr. Antonio Peñafiel’s training prepared himwell for assemblingthe authoritative study that would establish, scientifically, the‘potability’ of Xochimilco’s water, and, politically, its role in the‘salvation’ and ‘stability’ of a growing national capital with manyand complex water woes. Peñafiel was a polymath, trained as amedical doctor but probably known best for his work in statistics.His interests and abilities ranged across the disciplines of history,geography, linguistics, and public health, which he wove togetherinto a totalizing picture of modern Mexico. In his exhaustive study,which would ultimately support the federal takeover of Xochi-milco’s complex of springs, Peñafiel and his team had to respond tothe problem of how to represent and rationalize modern water’sfigurative and literal abstraction. He set forth the problem in hisfirst chapter, entitled simply, ‘Hygiene,’ with a straightforward butcausally-connected question: What, he asks, is the ‘influence’ of‘waters for domestic use’ on the capital’s public health?47

This question had been posed originally at an 1882 meeting ofthe Academia de Medicina de México. To answer it, Peñafiel had tonavigate between at least two ways of comprehending anddescribing. The first, for which his deep interest in history andgeography certainly prepared him, was an experiential sensitivityand an eye for the role of water in the city’s social and economic life,and for its peculiarities as a function of a unique environment. Thesecond, for which his statistician’s work and medical trainingprepared him, was to take samples and test them in a laboratory

44 The Memoria y Encuentros contains several observers’ accounts of the city’s water sitcentury.45 See Cossío, Memoria y Encuentros (note 14).46 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2). The study was actually written by both Peñafiel and Lam47 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), v.48 Latour, Modern (note 38).49 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), vi.50 This was not a unique or novel notion by any means. Long before Peñafiel’s time, foauthorities. See Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2).

setting, and to abstract and quantify. In so doing, Peñafiel’s studyestablished what in Latour’s terms could be understood as the‘Great Divide,’ a constitutional moment whereby old forms ofknowing and relating to water were ‘translated’ and ‘purified’ forthe modern water user. The resulting study conflated Xochimilcoand ‘potablewater’; both became knowable and exploitable as a giftof nature for the general benefit of society.48

Peñafiel’s report began by moving the analysis of Xochimilco’swater into the broader geography of the city and basin and, ulti-mately, the nation and world. Answering the question about do-mestic uses and hygiene, he noted, would ‘embrace the entireHydrology [sic] of the Capital of the Republic and also the hygienefuture of Mexico’ over all. Mexico, he said, has a ‘special Hydrology.’There are no ‘great rivers,’ and the city’s ‘economic uses’ of waterwere from the many streams and arroyos that drained basin’s steepmountainsides, forming its many ‘springs. artesian and commonwells, and. the water remaining in its lakes.’ This distinctive ge-ography also brought together a ‘peculiar’ combination: volcanicrock, high altitude, heat, and ‘intertropical light.’ Indeed, it was awholly different place from where flowed the ‘great rivers of thecontinents.’ This natural distinctiveness gave Mexico City’s waterboth its ‘positive and negative’ aspects. The negative characteristics,the study showed, had caused widespread ‘insalubrity.’49

He also assessed the effects of deforestation around the valley aswell, and in so doing made the case for using all of the humansenses in research. The cutting of trees for construction, industry,and cooking, he found, contributed to the desiccation of manywater sources. One of the consequences was the city’s notoriouslysevere flooding during the rainy season.50 In point of contrast, hediscussed the vast quantity of cypress trees one could see growingin the Xochimilco area as an index of the abundance of high qualitywater and the health of the surrounding environment. In the sameway, the health of a local spring could be measured, at least in part,by its ability to sustain certain highly visible species of flora andfauna. Water, he suggested, had to be understood as an amalgam oftaste, smell, color, feel, and clarity, even though its potability was, inthe last analysis, verified through the use of technical devices andmodern methods.

While Peñafiel’s Memoria is a careful study of the basin’s waterhistory and geography, its primary objective is to create the case forpotable water and a new delivery system as crucial for the city’ssalvation. The study was not meant to highlight water as a sensualexperience. Nor was it or to describe the city’s hydraulic politics;too detailed an examination of water politics might be disruptive tothe hydraulic future being envisioned. And yet all of these thingswere present: hydraulic politics, history, geography, and the idea ofwater as a sensual experience. Indeed, in Peñafiel’s text they aretransformed into a realm of socio-spatial difference against whichthe city must build its new hydraulic future. The study was none-theless tacitly political in that it was staking a claim for a particularspace whose springs would be used to sustain urban growth anddevelopment elsewhere. Its most powerful and influential conclu-sions, therefore, did not simply derive from the data on Xochi-milco’s water quality and quantity that were so carefully marshaledusing the latest scientific techniques. More important is the way in

uation made between the late colonial period and the first quarter of the twentieth

berto Asiain, but scholars generally refer to it as Peñafiel’s.

r example, Alexander von Humboldt had made the same observation, as did water


which these data were used to develop a narrative of ‘potablewater’ (and potability) as a naturally pure and abundant substance,and, subsequently, to let this narrative of purity and abundancestand in for the historical geography of water that otherwise per-meates the pages of the Memoria.

For Peñafiel it was imperative that the old structure of water bereplaced so that the basin’s social and hydro-climatic dynamics beprevented from contaminating the new substance. In 1830 thecapital reportedly had 769 private and 42 public fountains, as wellas nine different aqueduct complexes connecting the inner city toits wider basin hinterland,51 and much of this infrastructureremained in place when Peñafiel conducted his research. The wa-ters flowing in the old aqueducts and spouting from the fountains,according to the report, were ‘highly unfavorable to publichealth.’52 They were thought to pick up ‘organic and gaseous ma-terials from the swampy atmosphere on the outskirts of the capital.’The city’s interior was the most contaminating space, however. Asthey made their way through the ‘long and uncovered aqueduct,’the ‘soft waters’ of the old springs of Santa Fe and Los Leones, in thefoothills southwest of the basin, were especially contaminated bywomen using them to launder clothes. As a result, these waterspicked up ‘all of the filth from that use, and. the germs of infec-tious disease.’53 The capital’s future survival required that Xochi-milco’s naturally pure waters be extracted and moved to anotherplace, to the city center, and, most especially (though not statedexplicitly) to the city’s elite suburban development edge, to thenorthwest of the springs.

One of the study’s central conclusions was that the capital’s‘extraordinary mortality’ was the result of the ‘poor state of thedistribution of waters.’54 Distribution was not, however, discussedin the explicitly historical social or political terms, as question ofhuman settlement and the dramatic and growing socio-spatialdifferentiation and inequality that characterized urban develop-ment.55 Rather, this was largely a result of the way nature hadsituated water in the landscape (a common refrain amongst waterplanners today). Xochimilco’s springs would solve two problems atonce. First, they would provide clean and clear (that is, ‘potable’)water in abundance. Second, they provided sufficient flow volumeto wash and maintain the city’s drains. Solving the problems in thisway, the report suggested, would make use of the waters of sisterlakes Chalco and Xochimilco, waters purportedly not only ‘useless’but also ‘threatening’ due to their flood potential.56 Of course, theresidents of the southern lake zone generally did not agree thattheir waters were useless or threatening, and they certainly did notsee the proposed redistribution as simply addressing a shortcomingof nature. The political view expressed in the report e which by itsrecommendations separated the lakes from the springs and thepeople from the lakes e soon would prove devastating to the re-gion’s social structure, and to the basin’s economy over all.57

Peñafiel nonetheless understood many of the hydrological con-nections between the lakes and springs. However, the recom-mendation he made in the report qualitatively separated the two,bringing the springs into the modern city’s future. The modernfuture of the lakes (Chalco and Xochimilco), therefore, would mean

51 Cossío, Memoria y Encuentros (note 14), 335 & 336.52 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 155.53 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 155.54 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 158.55 Lear, Mexico City (note 3).56 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 158.57 On the destruction of lake drainage for lake villages, and for the basin over all, see A. Trégimen a la gran hidráulica, in Tortolero Villaseñor, Tierra, Agua (note 21), 219e251.58 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 78e79.59 Manuel Rivera Cambas, “Las fábricas se apropian el agua,” in Cossío, Memoria y Enc

desiccation. In short, such waters would have to become invisible inorder for potable water’s appearance in the city.

Peñafiel’s study thus brings into confrontation distant andproximate views, the abstracted data and laboratorial process withan accounting of the diverse qualities and quantities of Xochimilco’swater. On one hand, he arranged water on a universal scientificarmature of diagrams, charts, taxonomies, and formulae, providingflow rates, chemical analyses, etc. On the other, he spoke of water insensual terms, knowable also through direct human experience.Peñafiel dedicated an entire chapter to experiencing water organ-oleptically, that is, through the senses. For example, he says ‘Potablewaters should be: transparent and diaphanous, uncolored, withoutodor, fresh, and of an agreeable and light flavor, aerated, or withoxygenated air, and as far as possible without organic materials.’After air, he continues,water is themost crucial nutrient forhumans.Water of poor quality affects humandevelopment, andbyextension,even national progress. Indeed, Peñafiel’s argument for tappingXochimilco’s water rests on the assumption that water has a moralcontent, so there is a moral imperative to exploit that resource onbehalf of the nation (writ Mexico City).

Of course, the research could never capture the full scope of thespring system or of Mexico City’s water problem. His idea of anorganoleptic assessment largely ignored some of the most crucialaspects, including the people, the water users, of Xochimilco itself.Peñafiel and his contemporaries certainly acknowledged several ofthe negative environmental effects of previous water controlmeasures. But even with the best science and engineering, theycould not anticipate that the city’s future population growth wouldmean the rapid depletion of Xochimilco’s springs. As it turned out,the springs would not in fact be ‘the first and last recourse for thestability of the capital.’58

This is not to suggest, however, that Mexico’s turn-of-the-century water woes were socially constructed but somehow notreal or, more cynically, invoked as a justification for costly infra-structure. Observers’ accounts and the archival recorde the ArchivoHistórico del Distrito Federal, especially e include numerous refer-ences to insufficient supply for residents across the city, and toconflicts among municipal government, neighborhoods, factoryowners, and outlying towns. While conflicts between factories andneighborhoods often were often over quantity, as the number offactories increased so too did the number of conflicts over quality.Residents of the San Ángel neighborhood, for instance, foundthemselves in a particularly vulnerable position vis-à-vis the manyfactories being built to take advantage of the motor force anddrainage potentials of the Guadalupe and Magdalena Rivers, on thecity’s southwestern flank. In one case, residents claimed that theindustries had rendered the once ‘pure and crystalline water’ therecompletely ‘impotable,’ contaminating the rivers with ‘acids’ and‘colorants,’ and making their waters useless for the city’s many‘fields and gardens.’ They also complained that the companies weredifficult to fight, cowing dissenters by threatening to close the shopdoors and thereby eliminating jobs. ‘Capital,’ as one resident noted,‘is sacred, but their [factory owners’] power should be limited bythe general good [which is] even more sacred.’59

ortolero Villaseñor, Los usos del agua en la región de Chalco 1893e1913: del antiguo

uentros (note 14), 343.


Meanwhile, a factory upstream from the barrio of Tacubaya, inthe same general area, had called for blending together the watersfromthe springs of Santa Fewith those of Los Leones.Mixing the twowould provide the factorywith greater volume andmotor force. Yet,to the consternation of many in the neighborhood, this would sullyTacubaya’s famously cleanwater, which city elites had long enjoyed,even building country homes in the area to take advantage of itslushness. Businessmen countered that, ‘if Tacubaya lost the trans-parency of its waters, it would in turn gain in available quantity.’60

Residents were quick to point out, however, that the ‘dirty’ watersof the Los Leones springs ‘lacked the condition of healthiness thatthe crystalline waters [of Santa Fe] recommended.’61

Peñafiel does bring up the problem of factory contamination intheMemoria, as well as that of over-consumption of the city’s watersupply. On the east side of the city center, where the Canal de laViga introduced waters of lakes Xochimilco and Chalco into the SanLázaro Canal, stood a large ‘gas plant.’ Peñafiel and his team tookwater samples at points up- and downstream of the canals’ inter-section, finding extremely high downstream levels of ‘liquidoscurburados.’ The contaminated water, which theMemoria describesas a ‘black stripe [running] between two banks of scarce vegeta-tion,’ had created a zone of contamination stretching from SanLázaro to the shore of Lake Texcoco. Here was a place where ‘noliving being of a superior order could survive.’62

Then there was the Belén Paper Factory, also in the west. Ac-cording to Peñafiel, Belén had diverted at least one half of the SantaFe/Leones aqueduct to run itsmills.63 Peñafiel does note that inmostinstances, such as that of Belén, the factories availing themselves ofhydropower returned much of the water back either to the originalaqueduct or arroyo from which it was drawn. Yet, these matters ofcontamination and loss of quantitywere still quite troublesome, andthe Memoria urges that the ‘interests of the city’ should take pre-cedence over the needs of the ‘private [sector] whatever theircategory.’64 The needs of the city were quite varied and never takedefinition in the report, however. In the end, a conclusion that theMemoria returns tomostoften is thatwashing, bathing, thedumpingof fecal matter, as well as blowing dust were chief sources ofcontamination. Clothes washing receives particular attention.

Given the combination of perennial shortage and poor quality, it isclear from the archival record that people throughout the city, espe-cially after construction had begun on the Obras, were asking forXochimilco’s aguas potables, often by name. To illustrate, in 1915 agroup of residents from Colonia La Bolsa who had not yet been con-nected to the Obras complained that for too long they had sufferedfrom chronic gastrointestinal disease. This was a condition theyattributed to the dilapidated state ofwater provision in their area, andto their ongoing exploitation at the hands of private water vendorswho had taken advantage of the situation. It is significant that part oftheir complaint draws from ideas about bacteria and disease in cir-culation at the time, and to their connections to thewater supply. Thecomplaintdescribes thecoloniaasaplace, ‘whereeverything is sludge

60 Cossío, Memoria y Encuentros (note 14), 341.61 Cossío, Memoria y Encuentros (note 14), 342.62 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 128. The San Lázaro Canal was at this time also a primarycontamination in this case.63 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 24.64 Peñafiel, Memoria (note 2), 23.65 Carta al C. Presidente del H. Ayuntamiento de Manuel Torres Toval y Vecinos de la C66 On interdisciplinary considerations of visuality and modernity, see: R. Craib, FluvialDurham and London, 2004, 193e217; J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision anVisuality, Seattle, 1988; P. Krieger, Transformations in Mexico’s Urban Landscape, Representa67 The Condesa pump house requires considerable attention that we cannot give it in ththey were distributed across the city in pipes, taps and decorative fountains. Alberto Panwith three of the pump houses in Xochimilco. However, due to its function and placememotif and designed an allegorical fountain to sit within this frame; the fountain was ne

and filth and a focus of infection.’ La Bolsa’s water had ‘never beenanalyzed’ for the harmful ‘microbes’ that it was introducing intoresidents’ stomachs, making them ill. Moreover, fixing the problemfell squarely within the ‘duty of hygiene’ assigned to the city’s healthcouncil, the Consejo Superior de Salubridad. The complainant goes onto ask that, ‘in the name of humanity,’ residents be hooked into thenetwork and be given ‘the water of Xochimilco,’ which was in factalready being delivered into the ‘center’ of the colonia. The petition,then was that authorities should arrange to deliver it directly intotheir homes, just as it was in the wealthier neighborhoods.65

The visuality of modern water

The next phase of making Xochimilco’s ancient waters modernwasto enclose them, to remove them, and then bring them back into acarefully constructed view. Despite the ambivalence reflected inPeñafiel’s study, modern water was about visuality, the ability ofsomething to be seen, to be made, present, as a commodity and atechnologically manageable natural resource.66 New technologiesinsured both the controlled usage and viewing experience. Theviewing experience was also an enactment of the history andconquest of water as a substance. The 30 km between water usesand users and water sources was the spatial and temporal distancebetween the modern, urban, and sophisticated capital and its pre-modern, rural, and traditional hinterland. Xochimilco and its watersare to the south, distant, and in the past. Indeed, as the engineeringlanguage made clear, the waters were there to be collected orcaptured and brought into the up-to-date urban arena.

The relationship between visuality andmodernwater, especiallyas framed by the self-conscious national moment of the 1910centennial, is emblematized by the Xochimilco system’s pumphouses and the photographic documentation of the system’s con-struction, in the context of the celebratory excursion to thewaterworks. The pump houses were a pivotal part of the tour, andthe photographic album distributed to tour participants provided asouvenir as well as a confirmation of their participation as eye-witnesses to the achievements of Mexico. Modern water was notjust a function of concrete pipes or mechanical engineering; it wasalso formed at a nexus of tour, pump house, and photo album. Eachindexes a significant, global, and state-of-the art technology: thetrain, formed and reinforced-concrete, and the half-tone photoblock. Efficiencies of movement, construction, and representationbrought the ancient waters of Xochimilco forward literally andsymbolically into the present and future of Mexico City.

The specially outfitted trains sped the excursion from Cha-pultepec south to Xochimilco, where the tour began before headingnorth again to Mexico City. Stops were made at the first (the mostdistant from the capital) and third pump houses. From there, thetrain followed the route of the underground aqueduct and above-ground ventilation chimneys, reaching the monumental pumphouse in the Colonia Condesa, which bordered Chapultepec.67 The

outlet for the city’s wastewater. The gas plant was not, therefore, the sole source of

olonia La Bolsa,’ 20 de mayo 1915. AHDF, Fondo: Ayuntamientos; Vol. 42; Exp.: 648.Confusions, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes,d Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century, Cambridge, MA, 1990; H. Foster, Vision andtion and Visual Record, Acuápolis, Mexico, 2007, 220e251; and Scott, Seeing (note 9).e present essay. We note briefly, that it would store the waters of Xochimilco beforei designed this pump house so that it shared some of the Renaissance palace stylent, it was much larger. He also framed its primary façade with a triumphal arch-likever built. A. Pani, Apuntas Autobiográficos, Mexico, 2003, 54.

Fig. 1. Pump house at La Noria, Xochimilco, designed by Alberto J. Pani, completed1910e11 (Taken by Jeffrey M. Banister).

Fig. 2. Pump house at Nativitas, Xochimilco, designed by Alberto J. Pani, completed1910e1911 (Taken by Jeffrey M. Banister). (Note: sign over door indicates subsequentre-use of the building by Mexico City Water Department).


final stop took tourists below ground to one of the enormous dis-tribution tanks in Chapultepec, the site for an official ceremony tocelebrate the transformative modern moment.

These eyewitnesses confirmed ‘the undeniable ability ofMexican engineers to solve the most difficult scientific problems,even when natural obstacles seem(ed) insurmountable.’68 Thisinsurmountability included, as Peñafiel noted, the fact that Mexicohad no great rivers, and therefore no monumental reservoir, thehallmark of hydraulic megaprojects such as New York City’s NewCroton Dam (1906) or the Marathon Dam that brought water toAthens (1925).69 We might imagine that the train journey itselfcreated moments of viewing monumentality from the array ofdisparate objects in the landscape of the waterworks, but thejourney could not conjure a single, visible, monumental site of thegathering waters.

Water was instead collected at four reinforced and formedconcrete pump houses situated adjacent to luxuriant and veryvisible springs, called ojos de agua (literally an eye of water),about 2e3 km apart around the southern edge of Lake Xochi-milco. As time was of the essence to build the pump houses tosave Mexico City and its future e not to mention making thempresentable in time for the centennial festivities e chief engineerManuel Marroquín and chief architect Alberto Pani designedpump houses and pipes in concrete which fostered the rapidconstruction of a durable infrastructure resistant to seismic ac-tivity.70 Like the multiple public and private structures built inMexico City around the turn of the century, the pump houses alsoexhibited eclectic historical styles, here, neo-Renaissance and asynthesis of neo-Romanesque and neo-Baroque.71 Three of the

68 García, Crónica Oficial (note 1), 212e213.69 On the Croton and Marathon systems, see: Bone, Water-Works (note 12); Galusha, L70 On the use of concrete in the Xochimilco system, see Pani, Apuntas Autobiográficos (Aprovisionamiento de Agua Para la Ciudad de México, Mexico, 2003.71 Eclecticism in the context of the Porfiriato has been the subject of multiple discussionFernández, Huellas del Pasado: Revaluando el Eclecticismo en la Arquitectura Mexicana dAmplitud del Modernismo y Modernidad (1861e1920), Mexico, 2001, 221e250; J. Gutíerrez5e49; and, C.M. Reese, Nacionalismo, Progreso y Modernidad en la Cultura ArquitectónicaMéxico: La Amplitud del Modernismo y Modernidad (1861e1920), Mexico, 2001, 175e219.72 Bonnet Correa, La Arquitectura de la Epoca Porfiriana (note 40), 22. Bonnet Correa alsobe made from cheaper materials. This is very suggestive for understanding the relationitself. We take this up in our larger study.

pump houses were modeled on Italian Renaissance palaces withtheir characteristic rustication and quoining [Fig. 1]; the fourthadapts the surface polychromy and elaborate molding of aRomanesque-Baroque church. [Fig. 2] If at this point in ourresearch we cannot confirm precisely why Pani specifically choseto design the pump house exteriors after Renaissance palaces anda Baroque church, we can suggest how they contributed to aparticular presentation of Xochimilco’s waters. Certainly, weshould not reduce this Porfirian eclecticism to the idea thatbuildings in historicized styles are merely functional objects cladin arbitrarily decorative skins.72

The pump houses and aqueduct were responses to in situ hy-draulic conditions and suggest a need to simultaneously presentmodernwater as something easily visible and accessible, while alsocontrolling both view and access, much like water in a largereservoir. Building three of the four pump houses like rectangularRenaissance palaces implies an intention to create a uniform styleand presence for a public work that was scattered in parts acrossthe landscape. The cruciform plan of the church-like pump houseapparently disrupts this uniformity. In fact, the plan of both types ofpump houses took their cues from the needs of water extractionengineering. The project documentation prepared by Marroquínshows that the three palace-like pump houses each enclosed arectangular collection well, and so had a rectangular plan. [Fig. 3]The fourth pump house has a cruciform plan outlining what in achurch would be a nave crossed by two short arms as well as apolygonal space at its end, similar to an apse [Fig. 4] Marroquín’sdocumentation tells us that this water collection well specifically

iquid Assets (note 12); Kaika, Dams as symbols of modernization (note 12).note 67), 49e55; and H. Ramírez de Alba, Estado Actual de las Obras del Sistema de

s, see for example: Bonnet Correa, La Arquitectura de la Epoca Porfiriana (note 40); M.el Siglo XIX 1900, in: S. G. Widdifield (Ed), Hacia Otra Historia del Arte en México: LaHaces, Lectura de una Decoración Memoria del Museo Nacional de Arte, (4) 1991e1992,de la Ciudad de México, 1900, in: S.G. Widdifield (Ed), Hacia Otra Historia del Arte en

points out that regional structures often mimicked those in Mexico City and couldship between the pump houses in Xochimilco and other structures in Mexico City

Fig. 3. Plan of the Pump house at La Noria, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Memoria Descriptiva de las Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México Mexico1914. Courtesy of Stanford University Libraries.


required an octagonal structure.73 Pani designed this building toaccommodate the collection well by locating it in the apse.74 Thus,the collection wells, and more specifically, the extraction machin-ery used to draw the water into view, were accommodated byspecific floor plans. The so-called cladding Pani chose to framethem was completely appropriate in the logic of turn-of-the-century architectural practices. The pump houses bracketed offthe landscape of water, framed it with authority through theinterplay of secular and sacred geometries and historical styles.

Bringing Xochimilco’s waters into view through the pumphouses is evident in other ways as well. The structures wereimposing but human-scaled, two stories to the roofline, anddramatically punctured by multiple windows on all sides. From theoutside the windows invited the curious to see what was inside thebuildings. On the inside they created open and brightly lit contextsfor the various engineering components. [Fig. 5] Of particularimportance to Marroquín and his team was the visibility of thewater in the collection well. A viewer could look down through therectangular or octagonal opening in the floor to see the waterbelow. A polished brass railing both called a viewer’s attention tothe opening and protected them from falling into it. [Fig. 6] Andwhile it is not likely that hordes of tourists made the journey to see

73 M. Marroquín y Rivera, Memoria Descriptiva de las Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potab74 In our larger project we explore the bracketing off of the wells in the pump houses awell in the apse-end of the Nativitas pump housewith its evident baptismal associations.that invoke both pre-Hispanic and baroque architectural models and practices in Mexicotablero) characteristic of Teotihuacan architecture. At Nativitas, the polychromy and oRodríguez adjacent to the Metropolitan Cathedral in the Plaza Mayor in the eighteenth75 García, Crónica Oficial (note 1), 213.76 Inauguración de obras para el abasto de aguas de Metrópoli, El Pais, September 22,

these waterworks after the centennial tour, the pump houses wereconstructed and outfitted as if a viewing public was expected to seea performance there. The collaboration of the material structure ofthe building, of penetrating daylight, the polished surfaces of fit-tings, and the engineering works themselves enacted what engi-neers called the ‘alumbramiento del agua’ the bringing to light ofwater, the bringing of hidden (subterranean) water to the surface.Xochimilco’s spring waters were transformed from object to pro-cess, from placid ojos del agua to a ‘functioning of the powerfulmachinery that makes the water spring up in a clean and plentifultorrent.’75 And at the end of the tour when participants reached thedistribution tanks, and descended into one to hear the grand ora-tory about Marroquín’s Obras, the space was illuminated by hun-dreds of incandescent light bulbs. These allowed the crowd ofalmost 1000 people to appreciate the scale and ingenuity of theengineering, bringing the objects, users, and uses of modern waterto light.76

Genaro García’s dramatic declamation above about what tour-ists saw at the waterworks was published in a huge 1911 volumededicated to the activities of the centennial. Like most commer-cially printed publications of the period, the book included text andimages. The photographs were placed throughout the pages,

les para la Ciudad de México, Mexico, 1914, 58e64.nd the transformative associations of water. This is most poignant in the octagonalAdditionally, the pump houses will also be explored in relation to decorative motifs. For example, the pump house at La Noria incorporates the slope and batter (talud/rnate stepped molding evoke the high Baroque of the Sagrario, built by Lorenzocentury.

1910, 3.

Fig. 4. Plan of the Pump house at Nativitas, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Memoria Descriptiva de las Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México Mexico1914. Courtesy of Stanford University Libraries.

Fig. 5. Photograph of the Interior of the Pump House at La Noria, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México, Mexico1910.


Fig. 6. Photograph of the Interior of the Pump House at Nativitas, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Memoria Descriptiva de las Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para laCiudad de México Mexico 1914. Courtesy of Stanford University Libraries.


showing multiple views of people, places, and events, even to thepoint of redundancy.77 The technology of the half-tone photo blockallowed the publication of such awork because the text and imagescould be printed together e a far more efficient and cost-effectiveprocess than collotype printing.78 Illustrations were ever moreimportant and visible, a particularly significant advance utilized inthe numerous volumes of architectural photography producedglobally around the turn of the century. Half-tone photo blockprinting allowed more visual information to be woven throughoutthe text, visually spread throughout it. As Ackerman and Elwallpoint out, it changed the presentation of views of buildings fromthe single iconic image tomultiple views of the same object, drivingan expanded economy of architectural photography.79 This is no-where more clear than in Manuel Marroquín’s 1914 official publi-cation on the development, design, and building of the Xochimilcosystem.80 Over one hundred photos of different sizes were spreadthroughout the 600 pages of text, plans, and tables.

We know that Marroquín had been preparing this study forseveral years, since he had already published a very condensedversion of it in 1910. This was the book given to the centennialtour participants described in Genaro García’s chronicle of thecentennial.81 It is oriented horizontally, just shy of 9 � 11 incheswith 27 pages of photographs, 2 fold-out maps and 26 pages oftext. The text briefly describes various aspects of the history,participants in, and engineering of the project. Marroquín willoccasionally refer the reader to the accompanying vistas or gra-bados to demonstrate what he is talking about, but the text andimages effectively appear as discrete sections that can stand ontheir own. Double rules frame the photographs; this is true evenwhen two or three small photos appear on one page. The rulestidy them into a visually uniform format. This presentation of the

77 García, Crónica Oficial (note 1), 213.78 Elwall, Building with Light (note 41).79 See Ackerman, Origins (note 41); and Elwall, Building with Light (note 41).80 Marroquín y Rivera, Memoria Descriptiva (note 73).81 García, Crónica Oficial (note 1), 213. As Reese and Reese, Revolutionary urban legaconstraints he could not publish all of the photographs originally taken of Centennial e82 Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal, Fondo Ayuntamiento, Aguas e Tacubaya y otr

waterworks simulates the personal souvenir travel album with itstraditional tipped in photographs. It makes use of modern tech-nology to create an historical artifact in much the same way thatmodern reinforced, formed concrete was used to construct pumphouses in historical styles.

The photos, taken between 1907 and 1910 when the systemwasstill under construction, were organized in a sequence that repre-sents the network from spring to distribution lines in the city. Thebook’s organization parallels the geographic itinerary of the touritself, and rehearses the argument for controlling Xochimilco’swaters. The photographs narrate a natural and political history thatorders the picture of water frommost to least visible and from pre-modern to modern. The first photo shows a lone boater paddlingacross the rippling surface of a spring, the picture of naturalabundance as yet untouched by the technology of modern water.[Fig. 7] It is structured through the conventions of pictorialistphotography of the nineteenth century, emphasizing a horizontallandscape scene, with subject matter underpinning the trope ofXochimilco as picturesque and fertile. This represents the ‘waterthat nature has put within our reach,’ there and available to view‘since time immemorial.’82 The last photo in the album shows theinstallation of the final section of pipe downtown in Mexico City,where the container now substitutes for the thing it carries.

The pump houses were framed to capture the greatest possibleexpanse of the buildings, from a distance and at oblique angles, sothat they appear much larger and more imposing than they did inperson. This was the typical format found in nineteenth-centuryalbums destined to be enjoyed by tourists after the fact, to makecontinually present their travels to distant lands and great monu-ments. Photos of twoof the pumphouses includewell-dressedmen,women and children posed around the entrances. [Figs. 8 and 9]

cies (note 40), note García pointed out in his introduction that because of budgetvents.os Pueblos, Vol. 58, Legajo 2, expediente 58, 2 and 3.

Fig. 7. Photograph of the Springs at Nativitas, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México, Mexico 1910.

Fig. 8. Photograph of the Pump House at Nativitas with visitors, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México, Mexico 1910.


Fig. 9. Photograph of the Pump House at La Noria with visitors, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México, Mexico 1910.

Fig. 10. Photograph of Ventilation Chimney on the main aqueduct route between Santa Cruz and the Condesa with visitor, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Obras de Provisiónde Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México, Mexico 1910.


Fig. 11. Photograph of Distribution Tank with visitor, reproduced in: M. Marroquín y Rivera Obras de Provisión de Aguas Potables para la Ciudad de México, Mexico 1910.


They are shown is if they have just left or are just entering thebuildings, and embody the importance of witnessing the capture ofwater within, just as the tour participants did along their journey.

This album availed itself of traditional conventions of touristalbums, turning views of modern waterworks into views ofmonumental wonders. A sturdy fellow jauntily sporting a boater,for example, stands next to one of the colossal ventilation chimneysthat marked the route of the aqueduct. [Fig. 10] Another similarlyattired fellow is posed inside one of the four distribution tanks inChapultepec, leaning leisurely against a supporting column, framedby the dramatic contrast between light and dark. [Fig. 11] He isdwarfed by the concentric circles of the columns in such a way thatthe view takes on the archaeological allure of ancient temples andmosques. A reporter who accompanied the participants into thetank during the centennial tour said it was as if one found oneselfentering ‘subterranean mysteries,’ a view that this photo en-hances.83 The tourists become discoverers. Moreover, the image isthe opposite and yet the same as the image of the lone boater onthe spring that opens Marroquín’s album; together they bookendthe technological and representational process of bringing Xochi-milco’s waters to light in distant Mexico City. Once water could nolonger be seen always and everywhere it required the photographto make a permanent record of what it was and what it became.Indeed, the representation of water proved to be just as ‘durable,useful, and beautiful’ as any public work.

Conclusion

Standing in the empty storage tank that September

Documents

Conversations About Water and Its Objects - Journal of Historical …widdiman.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/JHG.pdf · 2014. 10. 26. · The debut of ‘modern water’ in early