ENCYCLOPEDIA

Accident

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On November 5th, 1955, the rainwater had built up in the ancient, salty basin of Lake Texcoco, delivering it for a while from its apparently irreversible desiccation. The lake appears in the photos of the time as a mirror of silvery water fading in the distance, making us momentarily forget that in the dry season, this body of water disappeared completely from the map, leaving a several-hectare-wide wasteland in its place. During the months previous to the arrival of winter, this concave and hollow terrain temporarily received the water from the gushing mid-year storms, tainted by the residues the stream carried from the metropolis’s center. The silvery mirror the pictures depict is more precisely a gray surface of dirty water, stored to prevent its spillage in the city streets. The odor of the waste water probably traveled through air according to the wind’s direction, arriving to the city of Texcoco if the currents blew east, or to the northeastern neighborhoods of Mexico City if the air blew west, just like it happens today with the gases released by the West Landfill. [...]

Agency

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On the shoreline of the Nabor Carrillo Reservoir there is a barrier made of red tezontle rocks, fitting into one another and forming a levee that rises one meter above the lake’s water level. This parapet is held together merely by the correspondence of the rocks’ concavities and convexities. A group of farmers from the Texcoco region built this levee to create a barrier preventing water overflow during rainy seasons. From a bird’s eye, airplane or satellite view, the stone parapet can be seen forming a perfect rectangle, a red line framing a mirror of dark waters. The rocks composing this line, broken by chisel into pieces of similar size, fit together by human hands, were torn from the earth to enter the domain of human agency. The rocks’ transportation from the quarry to the levee forces them out of a realm into another; they become an element fractionated by chisels, weighed, measured, and placed. They’re then bought by someone to become a mere item on an inventory of agricultural devices, part of the Mexican Federal Government’s accounting documents. The rocks have been dispatched and hauled on a truck, always in contact with the metal parts of the wagon’s container, as well as with the motor and its gasoline, moving a few meters above the asphalt until reaching their destination. They were taken from the Texcoco mountains, or from one of the hills rising east of this lake. Broken up by mining, the mountains, in turn, have become quarries. [...]

Airport

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Upon stepping out of the airplane, the travelers who’ve flown thousands of miles enter an intermediate realm, symbolically located halfway between the land they left behind and the one that will take them in. Glimpsed from a huge, recently landed aircraft, the international airport—this “non-place”—opens like an empty box at the end of a tunnel: it connects the plane with the ground in a labyrinthine succession of corridors and carpeted white gates, assorted with slightly-quilted black vinyl seats. The hallways are endowed with conveyors that work as treadmills, moving passengers who drag their luggage up to the immigration queues. Such queues, made of a series of tired bodies and overloaded backs, slither and condense up to the booths where the officers grant or deny access to the new territory. Then the other conveyors appear, like black rubber ellipses, which display bags of all sizes and shapes. The awaiting passengers congregate around them: several ellipses in a row let out a buzz that fills the entire space. Before getting out to breathe the air in the destination country, the customs officers guard the last frontier. [...]

Anima

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Walt Disney created a series of short animated films in the 1930s called Silly Symphonies: in them, different things from the “inert” world move, interact, behave, and gesticulate. They experience situations and even face moral dramas. Things as diverse as watches, bones, houses, chandeliers, mushrooms, and toys, are endowed with a pair of eyes, opposable thumbs, and human faces. They smile, cry, or sing; they feel emotions such as jealousy, envy, or pity. One of these clips, Flowers and Trees, takes place in a corner of the woods, at dawn. The trees wake up and greet the sun stretching their branches like arms, yawning with a face located right under the green leafy hair of the foliage. Stunningly standing on legs, the flowers do gymnastic feats while the mushrooms smile with their gleaming heads. All things sing in unison and dance, encircled by birds depicted as little chirping children. In the middle of this crowd celebrating the daybreak, the trees socialize, they take up roles and postures, facing the dilemmas of amorous courtship, rivalry, and reconciliation. In the feud for the love of a slender and think-leafed kapok, a story unfolds were good and evil wage war, as if such story took place in a realm more human than vegetal. [...]

Animism

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The word animism was coined at the outset of anthropology, to describe certain practices of human groups called “primitive cultures.” Primitive cultures were often observed from a critical distance. Thus, they were different from other cultures, the civilized. Under scrutiny by anthropologists, the former were measured according to the historical progression of human development whose culmination was embodied by the way of life of Western Europe’s peoples towards the end of the 19th century. Following this progression, the primitive peoples lagged behind in respect to the Europeans, living in their present time the past of the latter: while in Europe, great cities and steam engines were built, the primitive were in their cognitive and productive infancy. In this sense, the primitive weren’t as human as the observers: they were subaltern, incomplete, marginal humans, deprived from the tools of modern technology. These “lesser” humans were typically defined with characteristics antithetical to those of their observer: unmodern, unscholarly, deprived of civilizational gadgets, non-metropolitan residents. They typically weren’t aware of the ontological distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the living and the inanimate, and therefore had no devices to account for the “world.” They couldn’t tell feeling from thinking either. [...]

Archaeology

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On the report written by Parsons and Morett about their archaeological expeditions in Lake Texcoco during the 1980s and 90s, there is a mention of a landfill site made from debris from the Federal District. Such debris lay beside the road recently opened by the National Water Commission (Conagua). Among the rubble, there were archaeological tepalcates (ancient Mexican ceramic objects), carved stones, and other objects belonging to the ancient indigenous communities, mixed up with modern urban materials. Archaeologists tell how part of their fieldwork took place within such rubble accumulations, learning to distinguish the more valuable materials from the more recent. They found millenary pieces mixed with today’s objects; in this mix, the mundane collided with the archaeologically valuable.  [...]

Archive

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By the Forest of San Juan de Aragón, on the northeast edge of Mexico City, stands an architectural complex of one-story buildings, framed by a white fence, always closed and guarded by a watchman in a black uniform. This complex and the neighboring forest are only a few blocks away from the Benito Juárez Airport. The airplanes that take off and land every few minutes feel very near, flying at such low altitudes. Inside one of these buildings there’s an archive containing the documented history of the now desiccated Lake Texcoco: a small, low-ceiling hall, with a few wooden shelves holding binders lined in burgundy leather, along with a few thin-paged, softcover books. The wooden furniture is covered by a thin layer of dust, and a smell of old paper and humidity. The National Water Commission (Conagua), the government entity in charge of every matter regarding the (former) lake, occasionally publishes an illustrated journal that describes the developments of certain infrastructural projects which have been completed in some areas of the desertified lacustrine land: the planting of fruit trees; the details of a new water well; the innovations of the landfill site and how it transforms garbage into fertilizer for a fertile land in the future. [...]

Artifice

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In 2012 an earthquake reaching a magnitude of nearly 8 points on the Richter scale took place in Mexico City. Due to the earth’s movement, small cracks opened in a number of buildings, objects fell from tables, and the offices located in skyscrapers along Paseo de la Reforma sent their employees home.  

Over in the south, in the Tláhuac Forest, a recently built lake ceased to exist on that day. It was a place where boats sailed, and around which families and lovers would gather on weekends. The earthquake shook the base of this lake, cracking it open like an old shell, opening holes in the earth which caused the water to be absorbed immediately, making the lake disappear in a matter of hours. From one day to the next, the lake had vanished: on the dry ground a few anchored vessels remained, as if dragged onto and abandoned in a vacant lot.  [...]

Birdstrike

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Many airports around the world are located by the sea, where seagulls and other sea birds are regular inhabitants. In these habitats, birds are forced to retreat when airplanes approach, rendering untenable the coexistence between animal and machine. Both avian and aeronautic creatures may travel within an open, clear, and apparently limitless space, unconstrained by the same severe limitations land movement is bound to. Nevertheless, there needs to be a (unilateral) demarcation of the skies. The technical name given to the possible chaos generated by an encounter between an airplane and, for instance, a flock of migrating ducks, is “birdstrike.” In said “strikes,” a group of birds flying at 100 km/h may crash against a plane flying at 900 km/h. If, as a result of such crash, a bird as large as a seagull, pelican, or duck happens to accidentally become stuck inside a turbine, the plane can break down and fall, crashing into land or sea.  [...]

Bond

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The Nabor Carrillo Reservoir is outlined and contained by a levee made of red tezontle rocks. Product of volcanic emanations, these rocks were once cast out of the earth’s center to cool down on the surface and break into small chunks. Today, they guard a body of water that was also cast out. The Nabor Carrillo receives a shiny-blue, clean-smelling, salty water, as if from the sea. It has made a long trip, just like the stones. Black and dense, the sewage water of northeastern Mexico City is dumped in Lake Churubusco, on the western edge of Lake Texcoco. There, it is treated by refined methods and invisibly pumped into the Nabor Carrillo. The heat evaporates the water into the air breathable from the shore, while millions of gallons of processed water arrive to the opposite shore. Flocks of ducks, migrating every winter in a long journey from Canada, make a stop on this water.  [...]

Building

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On Insurgentes Avenue, in southern Mexico City, a twenty-story tower stands and halves the horizon, made of concrete and metal sheets. This building is guarded like a fortress: to get in it is necessary to go through several security checkpoints, followed by a pair of heavy elevators. Upon stepping out of the elevator, each floor, identical to the previous one, spreads like a labyrinth of cubicles and non-descript desks, framed by a corridor that crosses the space on one side. There’s a row of offices with closed doors, all identical. Each floor in this building resembles a mirror device where a single piece of furniture is reflected and multiplied infinitely. The employees occupying each cubicle are mesmerized in their computer screens, and only look up to see me walking by, to lower their gaze towards the screens again. Their fleeting gestures signal a disturbance in the order of a place dominated by silence, the phones’ ringtone, and the sound of dozens of keyboards typed on in unison.  [...]

Campground

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Along the line that divides the land of Lake Texcoco from the ejido of San Bernardino, west of the ancient basin, there is a fence made of concrete posts fixed in the ground, with three rows of tense barbed wire strung between each post. A tin billboard stands next to the fence, showing a barely legible layer of paint, corroded by rain, wind, and the soil’s salinity. The sign announces: “Federal Zone: construction site for the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park.” Around the sign, grass rises half a meter above the ground; brushwood has scrambled into the scene, intertwined with the green, dense turf. Although being partially made of concrete, the fence looks feeble, and its height can be surpassed if one uses the wires as steps to climb to the other side. It seems to have been erected as a symbolic division between two territories, as a warning or a signal to the ejidatarios (owners of ejido lands) on the San Bernardino side: “these lands do not belong to you anymore; they belong to no-one except the lake itself, zealously guarded by the vigilant eye of the Government.” A few meters away from the fence, the National Water Commission (Conagua) has in effect erected a surveillance booth, looking eastward; a woman in a black uniform leans out, greeting us and returning to her post, to fix her gaze upon a horizon of possible threats which lie all on the other side of the fence. [...]

Capital

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Michael Taussig spent years on the Colombian Pacific coast studying a new form of animism popularized among workers of the sugar industry, after the arrival of capitalist forms of labor. In Colombia as well as in Mexico and other American countries, especially in urban centers such as Bogota and Mexico City, accumulation, alienation, and wage work are aspects of capitalist societies that have become naturalized: we are individuals inserted in these societies (and in the difficult cities that serve as their setting). We buy, sell, and labor in workdays which are homogeneously sorted into work and leisure. We do so as if those were ideal ways of occupying time and space, as if such ways had always been there, only waiting to emerge at the right time in history. In this scheme, and in the light of this new “nature,” a few creations of this very same capital acquire substance and reality, while other entities become inert objects: commodities begin to palpitate with the vital flux of exchange and valuation, while people start to look as mere producing bodies, identical and interchangeable. Under the sway of this system, in communities where labor is bound to the preservation of the land and to the dignity of the worker, the abstract machinery of capital turns into the object of an animist gaze: foreign sugar companies, violently arriving to the fields of the Cauca Valley, acquire the tenor of a demon, a being that comes into life to suck in the souls of the laborers, to dry the earth out. [...]

Cartography

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In Google Maps’ flat view of the Valley of Mexico, Lake Texcoco looks like a wasteland, clearly divided from the urban area—which sprawls westward like a thick set of small squares—by a sharp straight line that crosses it from north to south. To the east, on the contrary, the monochromatic surface, what’s left of the ancient basin, quickly breaks into green and brown sections, interrupted by small lines indicating trails, borders or geological barriers: it’s a region and it constantly re-draws its limits. The towns and ejidos to the east spread irregularly, sometimes overlapping, sometimes sprinkling the lake meadow with encroaching dots or small rectangles. Often, farming villages that have feuded about their border with Lake Texcoco for decades, don’t stand out in this version of the map. On the contrary, the map pinpoints some inexistent places and shows geographical spots that have disappeared. Some towns or places that matter in the region’s political configuration are written in lower-case letters easily confused with the name of a street or a neighborhood in the city of Texcoco. Other settlements have no place in this flat, general representation of the territory.  [...]

Cemetery

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In 1983 the Lake Texcoco Commission wrote up a report on the projects proposed for the area demarcated under the name of the former lake. Little more than ten years had gone by since the decree instituting the area. The images, printed in four inks (out of phase), showed grassy areas with cows and pigs, sites under construction and forests sprawling into the distance. They differ starkly from what exists in the land nowadays. The technical language used by the engineers to write the report, with their promises for the future, optimism and anticipation, also departed from reality as observed today, thirty years later, in the land of Lake Texcoco.  [...]

Central Square

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In the middle of Mexico City’s Central Square, a pole stands more than 100 meters high, where a flag is raised every morning. It is put away every evening. The flag, divided in three vertical strips—green, white, and red—is thirty meters wide when laid out. When the wind blows, the flag waves slowly, always shifting in shape, rumpled or stretched out depending on the air currents. It sometimes casts a shadow on the floor, offering a shade for passers-by. The Central Square spreads like an esplanade framed by the metropolitan cathedral in the north, the presidential palace in the east, and the city hall in the south. It follows a layout replicated in other colonial cities and towns throughout Latin America.  [...]

Ceremony

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On May 16th, 2016, I attended the ceremony in honor of the passing of the sun through the zenith, in a hill of Nexquipayac. From the hilltop you could see the meadows of ancient Lake Texcoco—already modified by the construction company in charge of the New Mexico City International Airport project—sprawling a couple of kilometers to the west. From there, you could see the invisible border between the city and the countryside, which had been drawn in the last century. The towns of the Atenco municipality were bound together, perhaps only divided by a street, stretching along the shore of the former lake like one single strip. To the east, the crops at the outskirts of San Salvador Atenco were mostly intervened by sowing furrows, signaling the beginning of a new harvest cycle. Next to the road that connects the town with the hill there is a river, channeled decades ago by the National Water Commission. By the day of the ceremony, the river had been reduced to a small cement duct where liquid residues flowed after the towns flushed their toilets.  [...]

City

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Mexico City was called Federal District until 2015. Since then it became the state number thirty-two of the Mexican Republic, in spite of being a city. Its evolution from district to state can be understood as an administrative decision, as well as the consequence of a more profound transformation in its urban structure, from a circle to a “stain.” In 1824, when it was called “district” for the first time, the city still had Lake Texcoco by its side, a salty water mirror on its eastern edge. The surrounding municipalities kept their distance, giving it enough space to be a city and at the same time the territory that reflected, concentrated, and represented all the national powers. Around its center—a square built right on top of Tenochtitlan—the government buildings were organized in a harmonious spiral, creating a unit which stretched out homogeneously outwards, in emulation of the cities in old Spain.  [...]

Commodity

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The Tacubaya branch of Soriana Híper supermarket has the size of a hangar: if it was empty, an Airbus A318 or a Boeing 737 could be parked inside it. Let’s imagine this plane landing on Circuito Bicentenario (a segment of the beltway), touching ground on the spot where the Chapultepec Forest ends, to later make a turn and taxi into this monstrous building of the San Miguel neighborhood. Before the aircraft’s landing, the building’s facade would be totally open, the inside would be idle except for fluorescent cylinders shedding fain, blinking light all around. It’s difficult to imagine the irruption of a plane in the midst of a hub of vehicle and pedestrian traffic like that of the supermarket’s surroundings. It’s even harder to imagine an empty supermarket, when its purpose is excess, overstimulation: tons of products pile up three meters high, spreading in endless rows of variations.  [...]

Conagua

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Starting in 1917, water became a subject in the agenda of government institutions in Mexico: the Ministry of Water, Land, and Settlements was created in the 1917 Constitution. In 1926 it was renamed National Irrigation Commission. In 1946, the Ministry of Hydraulic Resources would take on the functions of the preceding commission. Afterwards, the Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources would derive from it in 1976. Finally, the National Water Commission (Conagua), was instituted in 1989, and operates to this day. All of the latter were instated with budget and administrative autonomy, with the power to modify the hydrological layout of the country, divert and channel rivers, dry up and re-flood lakes, drain aquifers, supply and stop the supply in any settlements. Changing names and sometimes capacity, the federal institution in charge of handling water dealt with the same matter that gave rise to it in the first place: managing water in relation to the land, thereby allowing settlement endeavors under the aegis of the common good.  [...]