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I thank Ted Steinberg, Alejandro Tortolero, Jeremy Adelman, Stanley Stein, Eric Engles,New York City Workshop in Latin American History participants, and HAHR ’s anonymousreaders for their encouragement and critiques. Hispanic American Historical Review 92:1 doi 10.1215/00182168-1470959 Copyright 2012 by Duke University Press The Desagüe Reconsidered:Environmental Dimensions of Class Conflict in Colonial Mexico Vera Candiani W hat does it mean to read history through environmental change? I explorethis question by thinking of change and continuity in culture, social relations,and economy as inseparable from how water, land, and ecosystems are used by groups of people with different aims and interests. Somewhat self-evident and valid everywhere, this idea can explain the significance of transformations that occurred wherever populous New World indigenous states encountered sud-den European colonization. To address the question at a manageable scale ina key region, this article reexamines the Desagüe, the drainage project under-taken by Spanish colonists in the Valley of Mexico, from its inception in theearly seventeenth century to the end of the colonial era. Both the urban elitesof Mexico City and indigenes in the countryside sought to modify the valley’secology and appropriate its resources, but each did so with disparate ideas about the substance and extent of this modification and appropriation. The resultingstruggle between these competing uses of nature both determined the courseof environmental change and shaped social and class relations in the Valley of Mexico.Lacking a natural drainage, the Valley of Mexico is an elevated basin of fiveinterconnected lakes whose level rises during the rainy season and falls duringthe dry months. Indigenous city-states of the region developed complex engi-neering to manage both flooding and aridity while ensuring food production,urban water supply, and navigation for exchange, diplomacy, and warfare. TheSpaniards took the indigenous Tenochtitlán as their own capital, which they turned into a key seat of imperial rule. From Mexico City, they strove to orga-nize a regional economy modeled on Iberian patterns, which required more 6 HAHR / February / Candiani extensive modification of the basin’s hydrology than that wrought by indigenoustechnology. By the mid-sixteenth century the lakes were filling with eroded soiland frequently overflowing onto the growing capital; therefore in 1607 colonialelites approved a massive artificial drainage project to dry up the lakes and helpcontrol flooding, the well-known Desagüe de Huehuetoca. As an attempt to reengineer hydrological dynamics on an extremely largescale, the Desagüe faced many natural and technological obstacles, but socialfactors also interfered with the ability of urban elites to shape the environment to suit their needs: to fix what and where land and water were and to drainaway much of the latter. The most important hindrance to drainage was thecontinued existence of an autonomous peasantry, whose uses for land and waterdiverged from those of both urban and rural elites. The complex, multifaceted,and often passive resistance of the peasantry is difficult to understand throughthe lens of traditional historiography, which considers the Desagüe as essentially a product of an implicitly urban creole ingenuity. In fact, the Desagüe requiredthe appropriation and redeployment of rural and local indigenous technology and labor. Land, water, and technological objects in the Valley of Mexico werearenas of ongoing struggle over use and meaning throughout the colonial eraand beyond. A Tale of Two Intellectual Legacies By focusing on the state and its actors, heirs of the liberal historiographic tradi-tion have missed important aspects of the environmental history of the region,such as how a large-scale environmental work like the Desagüe interacted withsurrounding power and property relations. Historians influenced by this tra-dition tend to deal with environment, science, and technology using methodsdeveloped while it was still believed that the development of the state, produc-tion, and industrialization (capitalist or otherwise) were inescapable and “pro-gressive” tasks for all societies. This approach was paradoxically reinforced afterKarl Wittfogel linked irrigation hydraulic engineering to the rise of central-ized bureaucracies, and after postmodern scholarship battered both liberal and Marxist tools without providing replacements suitable for material studies. Thishistoriography sees water and land conflicts through state-related institutionssuch as the market and the law and rarely strays from asking how water and landbecame commodities, how common rights were eroded, and how Indians usedthe colonial legal system to defend these rights.Unfortunately, our ability to understand human interactions with eco-systems historically is hampered by the insistence on attaching a value (positive The Desagüe Reconsidered 7 or negative) to economic growth and state formation, which keeps the state’sentities and actors “at the organizational core of (environmental) history.” 1 Clearly these categories of analysis are important and produce fine studies of water and land in production, urban consumption, and hygiene. 2 As exclusiveorganizers of inquiry, however, they obscure ecological and nonelite costs of environmental changes triggered by engineering “public” works created to ben-efit the “nation.” Within the broad topic of environmental engineering, includ-ing the Desagüe, this approach has kept technicians, authorities, and “peak”periods at the heart of narratives. 3 Consequently, Latin American environmen-tal history has found it hard to improve upon what Elinor Melville did for Mex-ico or Warren Dean for Brazil, particularly in what John McNeill calls “materialenvironmental history.” 4 Specific interrogations of nature are rarely driven intothe heart of traditional questions in political, economic, and social history, as Ted Steinberg points out for US environmental history, or as David Edgertonmight have added in his critique of history of technology as overly focused onchange. 5 Moreover, even with insights from studies of science and technology, 1 . Ted Steinberg, “Fertilizing the Tree of Knowledge: Environmental History Comesof Age,” review of Encyclopedia of World Environmental History , ed. Shepard Krech III, J. R. McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 , no. 2 (Autumn 2004 ): 265 – 77 . My parentheses. 2 . For example, Bernardo García Martínez and Alba González Jácome, eds., Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en América , vol. 1 (Mexico City: Colmex, Instituto Panamericanode Geografía e Historia, 1999 ); Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico, 1999 ). 3 . Among these are Louisa Schell Hoberman, “City Planning in Spanish ColonialGovernment: The Response of México City to the Problem of Floods, 1607 – 1637 ” (PhDdiss., Columbia Univ., 1972 ), and “Technological Change in a Traditional Society: The Caseof the Desagüe in Colonial Mexico,” Technology and Culture 21 , no. 3 ( July 1980 ): 386 – 407 ;Richard E. Boyer, La gran inundación: Vida y sociedad en México, 1629 – 1638 (Mexico City:Sepsetentas, 1975 ); Alain Musset, El agua en el valle de México: Siglos XVI – XVIII (MexicoCity: Pórtico-CEMC, 1992 ); Jorge Gurría Lacroix, El desagüe del valle de México durantela época novohispana (Mexico City: UNAM, 1978 ). Contrast Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniv. Press, 2009 ). 4 . J. R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 , no. 4 (Dec. 2003 ): 5 – 43 . 5 . Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107 , no. 3 ( June 2002 ): 798 – 820 . Exceptions include Michael C. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550 – 1850 ( 1984 ; Tucson:Univ. of Arizona Press, 1996 ); Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994 ); Cynthia 8 HAHR / February / Candiani most environmental historians still cannot explain how environmental changeand social struggle relate to the instrumental and organizational technologiespeople create to capture nature. Working within this legacy has yielded decreasing returns for our under-standing of human relationships with their ecosystems, at least for the colonialperiod. Marxist analysis spawned powerful alternative concepts in the historiog-raphy and rich debates, which bloomed for the colonial era around works of Enrique Tandeter, Carlos Sempat Assadourian, Steve Stern, and Emmanuel Wallerstein, among others. Although US environmental history often uses Marx’s theory of value and the concept of mode of production, US Latin Ameri-canists generally abandoned Marxism before its tradition bore ripe fruit. 6 Conse-quently, as we turned to environmental history we did so without the lessons that Tandeter’s generation had taught, particularly in social and economic history. These tools can lead to insights about why environmental engineering works can function in very different ways in different parts of the world. TheDesagüe was a project of Mexico City, for a long time the largest city in the western hemisphere but also a node in a colonial and later semicolonial set of relationships — a locus of uneven and combined development. 7 As in North America, Latin American cities have projected these colonizing relationshipsonto territories. But the Desagüe’s City of Mexico was not William Cronon’sChicago, its elites unrelentingly subjecting nature to autonomous metropoli-tan dictates, because Chicago (or London, Lyons, or Milan) did not evolve as acolonial administrative center of power collecting wealth that would be largely lost to the territory and its societies. 8 From the sixteenth century on, the hinter-land where the colonial capital’s drainage project sat happened to be peppered Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700 – 1850 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997 ); see also worksin the tradition of Angel Palerm and Eric R. Wolf. David Edgerton, “De l’innovationaux usages: Dix thèses éclectiques sur l’histoire des techniques,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 4 – 5 ( Jul. – Oct. 1998 ): 815 – 37 . 6 . Donald Worster and William Cronon have invoked these concepts but thought them insufficient: Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an AgroecologicalPerspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 , no. 4 (Mar. 1990 ): 1087 – 106 ;Cronon, “Models of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” Journal of American History 76 , no. 4 (Mar. 1990 ): 1122 – 31 . 7 . I reject the connotation of “development” in this concept as progress towardcapitalism. See George Novack, “The Law of Uneven and Combined Development andLatin America,” Latin American Perspectives 3 , no. 2 ( 1976 ): 100 – 106 . 8 . William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991 ). The Desagüe Reconsidered 9 with agricultural communities whose social organization and appropriationof nature were neither impermeable to nor determined by the market, capital-ism, or even the state, despite centuries of interaction with indigenous states.Sixteenth- to late eighteenth-century merchants, rentiers, and bureaucrats of Mexico City strove to collect the wealth of this hinterland. More determined toachieve “progress,” nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico City elites triedto create a mestizo Iowa-on-the-Lakes dominated by private-property relations and fully commercialized agricultural production as a basis for industrializa-tion. But their efforts never fully vanquished the peasantry and rural popula-tions in the basin of Mexico. At the same time, rural inhabitants, even at theheight of revolutionary mobilizations, were unable or unwilling to eliminatecapitalist forces from their midst.In Latin American environmental history, social interactions with eco-systems have been inflected through colonial relationships specific to theregion and to the early modern era, and through specific semicolonial rela-tionships from the nineteenth century on. 9 But this should not bar northernenvironmental historians from cross-fertilizing with a Latin American histo-riography that revitalizes the concepts of mode of production, the theory of value, and uneven and combined development. Without these concepts, wehave had difficulty imagining how the south might illuminate socioenviron-mental processes in both the colonial world and the northern metropolises. With them, can we transcend the prevalent mode of analyzing water and landas mainly inputs in production, to reveal them as the essential elements of thehuman-ecosystem nexus? This article tries to answer this using the concept of use and exchange valuein the Desagüe. If the Desagüe had a clear social content, how was this class biasembedded in the technological design of the “public work,” and what can physi-cal structures and environmental change tell us about how these priorities con-flicted with those of competing social classes? How can environmental history and history of technology help explain why and how an indigenous peasantry survived around the Desagüe but not in comparable sites? I tackle these ques-tions by exploring labor and technological appropriation in the works and thedifferent meanings of water and land, and by comparison with the English fensdrainage. By looking at how people used Desagüe objects to struggle over thesedifferent meanings and environmental change over time, instead of at the end 9 . Similar notions appear in Guillermo Castro Herrera, “Environmental History (Made) in Latin America,” ( 2001 ), H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online),H-Environment, http://www.h-net.org/~environ/historiography/latinam.htm.
