Roads of Water, Rivers of Dirt: Pre-Hispanic Canals and the Renaissance Grid in Colonial Mexico City

The city of Mexico was not only founded upon the ruins of Mexico-Tenochtitlan; it also inherited its amphibious character.  Despite the huge efforts to drain the lake, and the eventual development of a dry basin (mostly) in the western half of Lake Texcoco, colonial Mexico City continued to be shaped by causeways, dikes, and by the network of canals that had organized circulation within the pre-Hispanic city. Although the survival of some of the most important waterways has been acknowledged in the literature, urban canals have not received the attention they deserve, particularly as structuring urban components—parallel to, yet competing with, the Spanish Renaissance iron-grid.  This paper is an attempt to bring back the aquatic roads to the center of our image of colonial Mexico City: by focusing on their dialectical relationship with the grid and the network of dry paths and ways around the Spanish core, the paper aims to conceptualize a different spatial structure for colonial Mexico City—a more fluid, sinuous, and contested structure, and also a less “Spanish” one (though not quite “Aztec” either).