Vera Candiani. Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Maps. 408 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-8805-2.

Reviewed by Sterling Evans (Univ. of Oklahoma)
Published on H-Urban (April, 2015)
Commissioned by Leandro Benmergui (Purchase College, SUNY)

The Desagüe of Mexico City

The Spanish term “Desagüe” could be translated as “the removal of water.” This is exactly what Vera Candiani’s new environmental history of Mexico City in the colonial period is about; she examines—just exactly how all the water was removed for the making of that city. Most readers will know that what is today Mexico City, one of the world’s largest urban areas, was founded and built on Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. And most will recall the stories surrounding that development: wandering Mexica (or Nahua [Aztec]) Indians followed legends and omens to found their ceremonial and political center where Quetzalcóatl (the plumed serpent god) directed them, and hence, as the legend goes, they followed an eagle with a snake in its mouth that landed on a cactus on an island of Lake Texcoco. More than legend, the image of the eagle-snake-cactus-lake has become a powerful symbol of Mexico, gracing its coat of arms and its red, white, and green flag. Thus the Mexica labored to build their beautiful and storied city of Tenochtitlán there. In the sixteenth century, they were overthrown militarily by invading Spaniards who worked to build their own viceregal capital atop the ruins of the Aztec metropolis.

But to do so, of course, meant removing an even greater amount of water. So far this is a familiar story. But perhaps only a few people have stopped to inquire how that water was removed. Candiani, in this monumental book Dreaming of Dry Land, addresses this question. I will venture to say here that Dreaming of Dry Land will be one of the most important environmental histories ever written about Mexico and will become one of the most important colonial histories of that place and time. And seeking answers became a multi-archival task, as Candiani researched at twelve different archives in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Where could a reviewer even begin to explain how all of this unravels in the book?!

Well, appropriately, I will do so where Candiani does: with an incredibly useful introduction that spells out clearly the framing of her story in environmental history theory. This chapter alone I would assign to any student wanting to launch into colonial Mexican environmental history, and especially to anyone interested in the built environment, urban history, and massive development projects of colonial Latin America. It is one of the best pieces I have ever read on what environmental history is, an understanding of the important human-nature role in the development of a place. Part of Candiani’s thesis is that the Desagüe project represents how colonialism worked to shape modernity for New Spain (or at least for colonial Mexico City). However, she correctly reasons that one size never fits all, and thus goes to great lengths to show the various ways in which science, technology, the dispersion of knowledge, and even philosophy all served their own particular roles in the Desagüe project. Along the way, Spaniards and colonial Mexicans were carving out a new form of colonization and were practicing new arts of colonialism—all of which Candiani nicely identifies, defines, and interprets in this opening section on environmental history. Perhaps she sums it up best in the preface by arguing that “looking closely at human-environmental relationships can reveal that any colonization process, even more so than imperialism per se, ‘often looks different in degree but not in kind from the kind of “civilizing” projects that states carried out on their own populations and landscapes’” (citing Kenneth Pomeranz’s intuitive introduction to Edmund Burke and Pomeranz’s volume The Environment and World History [2009] in the interior quotation marks) (pp. xvi-xvii). On this point then, Candiani’s study delves into the development of capitalism in the early modern world, and how that played out in colonial New Spain, especially by focusing on the modes of production required for the monumental Desagüe project. But finally on this point, Candiani does not beat readers over the head with environmental history theory throughout the rest of the text. She does not need to; after defining the concept thoroughly in the introduction, she operationally uses it for the rest of the book so that it seamlessly is a part of the narrative of a larger history—exactly what I think the best role for environmental history should be.

The following chapters examine the story of Desagüe project via different angles. Readers are treated to excellent labor history, with class and race analysis that is important to understanding much of the mechanics of the hard back-breaking work of digging the trenches to drain Mexico City. Candiani suggests that such labor regimes altered Indian communities of the region, often with indigenous agency coming into play as Native peoples learned to negotiate the colonial system to their own advantage (often, but not always). This is also the story of Europeans’ dependency on indigenous knowledge of soils and terrain, experience without which the project surely would have failed.

While Indians were important to that part of the story, brothers of religious orders, especially the Carmelites, in colonial Mexico were instrumental in the engineering of the project. As learned scholars, they shared their understanding of geometry and physics to assist in designing canals for draining the city. Their “geometric worldview” came into active play here (p. 120). As Candiani explains, applying Euclidean geometry became essential for the engineering of the Desagüe, “including the basics of planes, the properties of points, lines, and angles, the methods of computation of volumes of different bodies, and how to draw them correctly, measure, divide, and calculate their dimensions according to the rules of perspective” (p. 95). And those designs and plans were all laid out in maps that Candiani discovered tucked away in Mexican archives. She skillfully interpreted them for the book and had them reproduced in various chapters. Innovatively she also weaves in how philosophical ideas and knowledge of theory informed the brothers and engineers, showing that the Desagüe represented a project of modernity based on science. Candiani also adds a fascinating transnational aspect to the story; engineers working on the project came from various parts of Europe. Flemish engineers were especially crucial to the project’s design and success.

At times her explanations of these concepts, however, may tax the reader. For the dissertation that Candiani wrote on which this book is based, that could be appropriate, but I fault the press for not recommending more dissertation-to-book conversion changes. Some of the chapters are too detailed in the coverage of these topics, which weighs them down and makes them stray too far from what the readers should be focusing on. Just as one example, consider these words to describe a machine capable of draining deep mine shafts: it was a “combination of the Cartesian theory of celestial vortices with a Kircherian aerophylacia and hydrophylacia” (p. 225). Likewise, there is a serious overload of long indented quotations throughout the monograph. In a time when professors encourage students to pare quotations down, I was surprised that so many of these block quotations passed by the peer reviewers and editors at the press. They are not essential to her arguments, and I am sure that many readers will be like me and skip right over them. I was also disappointed to see that the press had Candiani cut the bibiliography from the end of the book, requiring those readers and students wanting to check sources to dig through the footnotes. Let’s hope that will not become a trend in academic publishing houses!

In sum, what kind of a book is Dreaming of Dry Land? Without any doubt this is an important contribution to the fields of Mexican history, colonial Latin American history, cartographic history, intellectual history (with a strong focus on history of ideas), environmental history, labor history, and historical geography. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, all under one cover—it’s all here! The book could and should be assigned for reading in any courses, especially graduate-level seminars, in these fields. And as alluded to above, the book should be seen as important for the history of science, especially for the history of technology and engineering, with subfields in hydrodynamics, hydronics, hydromechanics, hydrography, hydrometry, and hydrostatics—specific fields and concepts evolving at the time of the Desagüe’s construction and used to design and implement it. I hope that historians will now place Mexico City’s Desagüe right up there with other water engineering projects, such as the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams in the American West and the Suez and Panama canals. This must be classified with these other water works histories, but with the understanding that the Desagüe project occurred at a much earlier time, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I could never explain all of the important parts of this book or why it is such an important contribution to so many historical fields. My advice then, just read this book!

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-urban.

Citation: Sterling Evans. Review of Candiani, Vera, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. April, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42204

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.