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Stephanie Ballenger
Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental transformation in colonial Mexico City By Vera Candiani. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.
In the 13 November 2015 issue of The Guardian, Mexico City architect Alberto Kalach describes his vision for the restoration of the lakes that were once the dominant feature of the city's landscape and the foundation of its productive ecosystem. Kalach contends that "the way the city has evolved is basically fighting against its environment."1 This centuries-long battle has had destructive consequences, extending from the city's vanishing supply of potable water to its sinking buildings and the draining and poisoning of its aquifer.
Vera Candiani's impressive book details the origins of the crisis Kalach would like to resolve. In an exhaustively detailed study of the Desagüe, as the ambitious engineering project designed to channel water out of the basin was called, she describes how efforts to control flooding and create more land for urban development and Spanish agriculture illustrate the class interests at the heart of Spanish colonialism. While Indigenous hydraulic knowledge and technology had been employed to develop a complex system of locks, canals and causeways, colonizing Spaniards had a different approach to, and different reasons for, removing the basin's water. They also had a different set of concerns when it came to the use and valuation of productive property. The Desagüe was driven by a mercantile and rentier elite's desire to protect the capital's built environment from periodic and unpredictable flooding. Dreaming of Dry Land provides an in-depth account of how this drainage project was carried out, by whom and in whose interests. Candiani argues that this undertaking reveals that Spaniards and Indigenous inhabitants of the lake basin and its hinterlands constituted two distinct social classes whose interests were inimical, rather than overlapping and intersecting.
It is a superb piece of scholarship. Based on over ten...