Island Capital and Lacustrine Hinterland: Mexico City, Flood Prevention, and the Post-Conquest History of Xochimilco, New Spain

Much as changes in Mexico City and its surrounding lake were closely intertwined, so the environmental situation of the capital had a profound influence on the colonial-era fortunes of southern communities such as Xochimilco. Itself a populous and prominent city, Xochimilco was renowned for its highly bountiful form of wetland agriculture. Using soil dredged from the shallow lakes, Nahua residents built fertile, raised plots of land known as chinampas. The chinampas afforded remarkably abundant harvests, and since the time of the Aztec Empire Xochimilco had played a vital role in provisioning the capital and supplying valuable income through tribute payments. Yet for all its abundance, chinampa cultivation proved susceptible to changes in the lake’s water levels. This vulnerability grew over time as Spanish authorities departed from Aztec precedents and instead focused exclusively on protecting Mexico City from flooding. Because the southern lakes lay at a higher elevation, the government relied on barriers to stop water flowing towards the capital. On several occasions, sealing off the southern lakes all but guaranteed the inundation of Xochimilco and the chinampa zone. And some of the floods were catastrophic: in the early seventeenth century, the dislocations were sufficiently severe as to bring disarray to Xochimilco’s finances for more than a decade. Accordingly, when viewed from the perspective of Xochimilco, the urban and environmental history of Mexico City can tell us much about relations between the capital and its hinterland as well as changes in the wider region’s political economy. By combining ethnohistory with political and environmental history—and by drawing from a wide range of sources written in Spanish and Nahuatl—this paper also provides an environmental dimension to our understanding of patterns of socioeconomic change for Nahua communities in the region.