INTRODUCTION

• Mexico City is, indeed, a city facing extraordinary social and environmental predicaments. This book helps explain the origins and evolution of these problems by tracking the rapid environmental transformation of the basin and identifying the assorted variables driving those transformations. But this is just scratching the surface of a deeper history.
• From Sotomayor and Ibargüengoitia to environmentalists and the public at large, there is a tendency to depict the recent history of the Americas’ largest city as one of inevitable and inexorable decline. It is a unidirectional history that conceives of the environment and people as mere victims of sociostructural forces. As the city grew, the story goes, communities were disempowered and nature bulldozed, never to rise again (even if nature has of late reasserted itself in such undesirable forms as flooding). Such a narrative offers uncanny parallels with Mexico’s political narrative. The monolithic, monstrous city was the offspring of an equally monolithic and monstrous political party, the PRI, which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, propelling the capital down a path of unrestrained growth. In this telling, Mexico City encapsulated the ruling party’s bungled governance, emerging as a microcosm of national ruination and disempowerment. However accurate a depiction of late twentieth-century Mexico City this may be, the narrative—if one accepts its coherence as such—occludes an earlier, more open-ended urban history. This book employs the tools of social and environmental history to challenge assumptions about the city’s growth and its relation to the surrounding Basin of Mexico from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
  • Anti-declensionist 
• Environmental decline is an unequivocal reality in the basin. Mexico City is not the place to upend declensionism within environmental historiography. But the destruction of nature is not the only, or the most important, story to tell; indeed, this story omits a great deal. In this book I underscore the ways in which nonhuman nature, rather than being torn asunder, was inextricably joined to the built environment in the process of urbanization.
  • So… not anti-declensionist but not not anti-declensionist?
• The world’s largest cities, like Mexico City, provide insight into the historical, spatial, and environmental process of urbanization. Water, energy, construction material, and other resources must be obtained, controlled, and circulated, an effort that necessitates much state power, technical expertise, and capital investment. These efforts transform environments, shape political structures, and engender myriad social struggles over the spaces impacted by urbanization. I contend that the development of Latin American (indeed all) metropolises needs to be understood within wider sociospatial scales, which are ever more global in scope.
• Cities are not discrete entities but rather are dynamically interconnected to larger metropolitan environments created through infrastructural works; through the harnessing of resources and the disposal of wastes; through commodity flows, population growth, and capitalist strategies; through ecological changes across disparate spaces; and through state-making practices and popular politics. The metropolitan environment, in turn, has molded what is politically possible for a range of actors—popular groups, planners, industrialists, developers, and state officials—operating on an uneven field of play who have had competing claims to a resource, space, or city service.
• A City on a Lake explains the why, how, and for whom of urban growth and draws on the scholarship of urban political ecology to zoom in on the interplay among power, planners, environmental change, and popular politics in Mexico City. It places nonhuman nature—reworked, regulated, and contested—squarely within the urban fabric.
• By following water, waste, dust, and forest products and other commodities, as well as urban experts and developers, in and out of cities, we can gain a more sophisticated understanding of how urban power has been exercised, reproduced, and challenged. Such a framework is vital to the urban historiographical endeavor as well as to the politics of urban justice and sustainability.
• As recent work in urban environmental history has implicitly alluded, and political ecology has explicitly argued, every city is a type of socionatural hybrid, a kind of urban ecology.
• State agencies, by reworking and regulating nonhuman nature, did more than arbitrate capitalist struggles over space, à la Marxist critical geography. They directly caused environmental change and conflict in their own right.
• Lest this discussion devolve into overwrought state reification, it is important to keep in mind that the governing bodies that territorialized power were born of and beholden to historical conjuncture and social contention. They were part of society, not ontologically separate from it.
  • It seems to me that much latin american history “devolve[s] into overwrought state reification” — there’s too much focus on the role of state in environmental change, infrastructure, scientific praxis and, consequently, how these endeavors accentuated the state’s scope and power

CHAPTER 1

• Lest this discussion devolve into overwrought state reification, it is important to keep in mind that the governing bodies that territorialized power were born of and beholden to historical conjuncture and social contention. They were part of society, not ontologically separate from it.
  • Imaginary
• If national and international trends provided the language, knowledge, and organizational groundwork for environmental planning, it fell to the Mexican scientific elite to articulate a vision of change specific to the basin that could translate into concrete action. And articulate they did, elaborating what I call an urban environmental imaginary: a shared set of assumptions about the relationship between the city and its environment. This shared imaginary did not mean that experts identified exactly the same problems or shared the same solutions; rather, it provided the common framework for debates over how to realize the sanitary city.
• These interdependencies and interactions, urban experts maintained, could be controlled through specific interventions in the environment that would enrich urban life. Some experts saw these interventions in terms of conquest, holding that human ingenuity would vanquish natural obstacles to urban progress. Others, particularly those planners attracted to forest conservation, argued that natural and cultural elements were so tightly interwoven that only by nurturing and cultivating nonhuman nature would urban life prosper.
• Regenerating the basin’s lost lacustrine environment through modern engineering would sanitize the city while simultaneously creating a bond with Mexico’s precolonial past in an emblematic memorialization of a natural landscape.
• Through a combination of subjugation, control, channeling (both literal and figurative), and cultivation of nonhuman nature, Mexico’s capital would prosper under expert guidance. At the heart of the environmental imaginary was a belief that modernity would make humans the protagonists of history. Despite urbanists’ proto-ecological understanding of interconnections and the reactive character of their interventions in the metropolitan environment, they adhered to an overriding conviction that nonhuman nature could be, if not rendered passive, at the very least muffled and directed. This perception proved to be severely flawed.
• The first hints that modern engineering in the Basin of Mexico might not “conquer all physical obstacles” appeared during the construction of the hydraulic works, as abstract blueprints came up against the force of material nature. Nature is not a blank slate on which humans write their own story; it is “vibrant” or lively in unexpected ways.

 

CHAPTER 2 – Revolution and the Metropolitan Environment

• There was a genuine fear that lakeshore villagers would join the Zapatistas—as indeed some villagers on the eastern and southern shores of the lake had. Many hoped that the project could serve to douse the flames of peasant rebellion, and that this could be done without expropriating influential hacendados
  • Agricultural development as antiradicalization
• Foresters attempted to instill in campesinos a conservationist ethic, which several officials claimed they were adopting. One went so far as to say that villagers were not changing their ways by pressure “but by convincing and acceptance.”70 Rather than this being an early example of “environmentality”—campesino adoption of government conservation—it is much more probable that villagers saw some benefits in participating in the more tolerant forest policies and abided by conservation to advance their own aims.

 

CHAPTER 3 – Water and Hygiene in the City

 

CONCLUSION

• The Mexico City that people know today, with its seemingly intractable socio-environmental predicaments, came to be in great part through the suppression of more egalitarian (albeit ephemeral and often disarticulated) alternative visions, and through the promotion of capitalist land speculation and industrialization dependent on the rapid reengineering of nature. Urbanization for much of the twentieth century was deeply contingent and contested, a power-laden process by which different actors vied for their own place in the urbanizing basin by disputing the appropriation, regulation, and transformation of what I have called the metropolitan environment—the lands, woods, and waters encompassed in sanitation projects and new settlements.
• For decades, indeed for centuries, Mexican scientists, from Juan de Torquemada to the many thinkers influenced by Alexander von Humboldt, had posited some degree of interdependency and interconnectivity between nature and culture. The linchpin of interconnectivity had been forests and their role in the hydrological system, climate, and soil protection.
• This story about the making of an expert-led environmentalism may not be so unique to Mexico City. Environmental ideas have traversed national boundaries and penetrated other megacities, where planners, engineers, and scientists, embedded within power-laden urban structures and, more recently, neoliberal governance, encounter both conditions universal to the modern urban experience—chaotic development, population booms, polluting effluents, and the squandering of resources—and other conditions specific to city, region, and nation. Moreover, throughout the Global South, environmentalism has tended to bifurcate along two lines: the environmentalism of the poor and bourgeois environmentalism. Around the latter, scientific experts, environmental nongovernmental organizations, the affluent, and corporate capital have come together to beautify urban spaces, arrest environmental decline, and diversify consumption and recreation options with the objective of achieving sustainability and enhancing their city’s position in a competitive global economy. Their efforts, however, have often neglected urban working-class communities in ways that parallel the consequences of recent restoration projects in Mexico City.39 This framing of the rise of environmentalism within urban ecologies and a global intellectual and political-economic milieu also contributes to scholarship that resituates its provenance, not as a reflexive reaction against urbanization but as a set of ideas that incubated within urbanism and developmentalism.
• Too often, environmental sustainability, similar to its sanitary forebear, has been packaged with social control and the refortification of power. What is missing is an ecological critique that integrates the social, a political ecology that lays bare the interactions, dependencies, and relations among unequal groups and classes and the ways in which those inequalities are reflected in and entrenched in material environments. The built environment, as an expression of state making, capitalist growth, and environmental philosophies, constitutes a set of barriers to social justice, but the city also contains within it past struggles that have left imprints on landscapes and in collective memory.45 These imprints harbor alternative worlds. My hope is that this book offers some ideas as to how urban expertise might coalesce with and enable popular empowerment to create a more environmentally just Mexico City.