Dreaming of Dry Land recounts a decades-long project to mitigate flooding in colonial Mexico City, primarily through the construction of a canal known as the Real Desagüe de Huehuetoca. Vera Candiani shows, however, that the Desagüe was much more than a drainage system, and its study reveals a great deal about the infrastructure of colonialism in New Spain. Candiani's narrative revolves around a disarmingly straightforward observation: notwithstanding the contention articulated by colonial authorities that flooding represented a generalised threat to social welfare, a viewpoint echoed by contemporary observers such as Alexander von Humboldt and by most subsequent historians as well, urban flooding primarily threatened the wealth of a select propertied elite whose urban properties stood to suffer damage. Flooding in fact benefited far more people, including native communities and not a few Hispanic hacendados who depended on the capricious waters to saturate their fields and deposit rich sediments. And while indigenous people had built their own hydrological works before the conquest, these were intended for productive purposes such as keeping the chinampas soaked, the soil fertile, and the lakes viable sources of transportation, fish, and game. For the urban elites, the water simply represented a threat. By the seventeenth century they decided to begin an epic project of taming and ultimately draining the lakes in the name of the ‘public’ good.
Candiani's meticulous reading of primary and secondary sources follows the project from its earliest phases to the independence era and beyond. In the early seventeenth century, colonial leaders recognised that the indigenous system of causeways used to manage water from the interconnected shallow lakes in the Valley of Mexico was insufficient, indeed never intended, to protect the city from flooding. In 1607 they approved a plan devised by royal cosmographer Enrico Martínez, who took slightly over a year to excavate a tunnel to drain water from a complex system of causeways and canals. This marked the beginning of an increasingly elaborate battle against seasonal inundation that has endured in fits and starts ever sense. Widespread flooding in the late 1620s revealed the tunnel's limitations, prompting the authorities to revive the project in 1631. Lettered friars directed the renewed project in its early phases and decided to convert the tunnel into an open-air trench that would, in theory, make drainage more efficient and comprehensive. The Augean task of excavating a two-mile long gash in the earth fell to indigenous workers drafted through the increasingly atavistic repartimiento system of corvée labour. In what Candiani describes as a characteristic act of economic expediency, the master planners refused to employ labour-saving technologies but instead forced native workers to dig with hand tools while tethered to ropes dangling from the steep sides of the cut. Although some observers voiced misgivings about the wisdom of the drainage project and the cost in misdirected native labour, these practices remained unchanged during the century-and-a half construction process. Despite the immense effort, siltation and various short-cuts in construction rendered the Desagüe less effective than its authors had hoped.
Historians are already familiar with the broad strokes of these events, but Candiani redirects our attention to how the appropriation and production of hydrological knowledge structured not just the construction process, but the epistemology of land use in the broadest sense. The earliest European experts depended heavily on pre-Hispanic structures and techniques, albeit within a resolutely European frame of understanding. Subsequent experts, and particularly the secular engineers who took control of the project after 1691, began to see it as an abstract thing. By the time that workers completed the final touches in 1788, the aesthetics of mechanical representation mattered as much or more than the actual movement of dirt, rock and water. And at all moments of its long gestation, Candiani shows that it was the mid-level supervisors, i.e. the people who actually managed construction and waterflows, who understood it best.
These observations allow Dreaming of Dry Land to make two ambitious arguments with broad implications for colonial history. First, Candiani argues that historians must abandon a functionalist paradigm and ask not whether the Desagüe and its adjunct components succeeded or failed in their intended purposes. Rather, she shows that we must critically reflect upon these intended purposes themselves, in order to consider whom desiccation benefited and what its broader effects were. Consequently, the book reconceptualises colonialism not as the secular domination of bodies and territory, but rather as a particular form of class domination. According to Candiani, rural people understood the use value of water in drastically different terms from urban elites, such that the progressive desiccation of the Mexico City hinterland was in essence an instantiation of colonialism. Urban power holders identified their own economic interests as the common good, placed the preservation of their property above the wellbeing of the hinterland, and consequently appropriated indigenous labour to complete a task that succeeded in lessening flooding only at a terrible human and ecological cost. This dynamic, which Candiani calls deep colonising ‘was not that of colonizing state versus colonized territory but of colonizing classes versus colonized classes’ (p. 284). Moreover, it recruited native people to labour in the destruction of the hydrological regime on which their agricultural livelihoods depended, forcing them to adopt new subsistence strategies.
The book's scrupulous attention to detail requires a great deal of attention to follow. I occasionally got lost in the geohydrological exposition, although well-chosen and abundant illustrations were immensely useful in this regard. Conversely, the insistence on the concept of class to distinguish between urban elites and rural people is in some ways unnecessarily abstract: as Candiani's own careful history makes clear, the distinction between ethnicity and what she defines as ‘class’ is in most cases vanishingly thin. Nevertheless, her understanding of deep colonising merits serious attention from specialists in colonialism, ethnohistory, environmental history and the history of science and technology. It opens the way to a nuanced and capacious understanding of how colonialism functions to naturalise the wholesale transformation of landscapes and lifeways, ultimately making dominated people into unwilling stakeholders in the colonial order.
