Vera Candiani's study of the desagüe, the project to drain water from the basin of Mexico and hopefully inhibit flooding in Mexico City, treats the project from its inception in the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Her exploration promises to bring new conversations, integrations, and questions to the study of New Spain. It is deeply researched, carefully argued, and clearly written. It focuses on the project and its promoters, designers, builders, and workers; in the process it opens new perspectives on the viceregal regime and Mexico City, and on the indigenous peoples who were throughout the majority of the producers and workers across the basin.
The analysis begins with an appreciation of the indigenous hydraulic achievement that controlled the waters of the basin to create an integrated system of dikes and causeways, canals, and richly productive chinampas—all sustaining an island city approaching a population of 250,000 when Europeans arrived. We see that the subsequent depopulation, driven by imported diseases, made the labor to maintain the system scarce. At the same time, Spaniards turned to a new economy focused more on silver and commercial production than on war and the extraction of tributes to sustain it. From the 1550s to the early 1600s, the city that was being transformed into the capital of Spanish power and commerce in North America faced periodic, sometimes devastating floods. Recognizing that native hydraulic controls were beyond their capacity to sustain, authorities in the capital concluded that the only solution was drainage.
Thus began the endless debates and experiments. The primary plan was to divert the Cuautitlán River northward to send its waters out of the basin. A first attempt after the floods of 1604–07 tunneled as far as the dry Mezquital River. When more devastating floods struck in 1629, designers tried a deep open cut in the earth. Through their debates and struggles, we learn about the state of science and engineering, the designers' innovations and their limits, and ultimately about their dependence on the knowledge and labors of local overseers and native workers. Candiani shows (to make a complex history too simple) that the desagüe drained enough water to inhibit the worst of floods in the capital, but not to prevent regular flooding.
She emphasizes that city authorities' single-minded commitment to flood control left the inevitable economic and social ramifications of the drainage, often problematic in outcome, out of the planning. The diversion of the Cuautitlán River disrupted irrigation and limited historic chinampa cultivation in the Northern Basin. Yet the desagüe was never effective enough before 1810 to disrupt chinampa production or limit canal transport in the marshy waters around the capital that extended south to Xochimilco and Chalco. In effect, the limited successes of the engineers, and the workers they drafted, served to protect key indigenous communities and their productive ways. The southern basins and their chinampas were not drained until around 1900—in a promotion of a different way of capitalism.
The larger integrating potential of Dreaming of Dry Land results from explaining the problematic outcomes mentioned above. Studies of viceregal power have not been the focus of our field in recent times. We have produced deep and illuminating analyses of indigenous republics, often grounded in native language sources, and we have innovative works on ethnic identities and gender relations. We have important inquiries into indigenous religious adaptations, and essential work on how native peoples and communities used the courts to defend their interests. While it is true that the latter do point us back toward the regime, Candiani's deep analysis of the desagüe makes unmistakable the constant interaction between the power of the regime, the commercial economy, and the indigenous republics committed to maintaining autonomies but ready to tap markets and organize labor when they saw benefit. Regardless of what they might have imagined, the privileged never simply ruled—people in native communities juggled their own internal structures to force authorities, entrepreneurs, and desagüe promoters to adapt to their presence, knowledge, and interests. As Candiani details, what passed for power in New Spain's capital depended on indigenous knowledge, organization, and effort.
Dreaming of Dry Land should lead us toward more integrated histories of New Spain, histories that study power and production, and community and culture, and emphasize their mutually dynamic interactions.
