The Eviction

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.  [...]

Concrete

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I’m the new rock, the new solid, the new stratum of the earth. I’m a hybrid of dust and liquid, a chemical reaction swiftly turning the heat and the softness of a sandy mass to a hard, heavy, geometrical, cold block. For more than one hundred years I’ve spread on the surface of the planet like the symbol of a new world that doesn’t need mud or stone to grow. Now I fasten myself on them and sink them with the weight of buildings, bridges, streets, houses, and airports. They’re all extensions of me, pure synthesis of my elements, made with the gray flesh of my molecules. My soul is steel, a new and improved compound of millennial metals. I’m a miracle, a ghost, for I emerge out of almost nothing with the most flawless hardness and multiply and expand at the mere call of human will. I simply appear there, where requested, and rise into a tower higher than a mountain, or sprawl for miles as a bridge between two shores, uniting that which the Earth had insisted in keeping apart. My surfaces are flat and smooth.  [...]

Construction

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A warehouse in ruins. Inside it, a heap of tools and gadgets on wooden, metal tables. Some spider webs in the corners, from wall to wall. Painted in blue and white, the walls are sprinkled with gray stains. On one of the walls, the inner framework is showing, after some layers of paint have cracked and come off. The chassis of a truck lies on the floor, bathing in dust. On the opposite side of this derelict space is a closet with its doors agape. In the closet, folders, binders, and documents in yellow paper pile up. They were made in typing machines which are now obsolete. Spider webs also bridge the binders. Some plants have found their way into it, growing in the cracks formed by the walls and the floor. The roof is covered by gray asbestos tiles, strewn with wooden beams. Rays of light slant between the tiles, hitting the dusty floor. The half-opened door moves with the gusts of wind. Outside, the grass grows by the walls, spreading all the way to the edge of a cobble-stoned road. Dogs bark nearby: theirs paws thud on the ground between pointy wicks of grass.  [...]

Coordinate

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On September 2nd, 2014, Enrique Peña Nieto announced the construction of the New Mexico City International Airport. Starting September 2015, the license holders have arrived in the land of northern Lake Texcoco to clean and prepare it. They also have rekindled a decade-long conflict with the Atenco community, and established a new demarcation vis-à-vis the National Water Commission (Conagua). In the weeks following the new occupation, the fertile and diverse vegetal layer of more than 8,000 hectares covering the land was razed to prepare the lot for the new constructions: the appearance of the soil quickly went back to what it was 40 years ago, when the lake was a huge salt desert. The Conagua SUVs trying to gain access to the northern area are now inspected (their access is restricted and sometimes denied), showing how the private sphere prevails ever more strongly over the public. [...]

Deer

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The first couple of deer arrived in New Zealand halfway through the 19th century, when a lord of Essex sent them as a gift for the Southern island. The female died without offspring, shot by a hunter, leaving only the male deer. The same English noble sent a couple of females. After their arrival, the deer began to reproduce quickly, populating the forests of this southern country, multiplying. Towards 1930, the deer were so many, rewards were set on their heads, causing the killing of more than a million specimens in the following decades.

Conagua engineers report in 2012 a pack of these animals arrived in Lake Texcoco from New Zealand, in a new migration far removed from that initial one departing from English soil more than a century ago. In some documents, these animals appear as belonging to a pack that in 2005 shared grasslands with cows and native horses, in some spot of the Federal Enclosure.  [...]

Demolition

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April 26, 2012. Houses were scattered far and wide throughout the Hidalgo y Carrizo lot, along the bordering zones of Lake Texcoco, to the east of its basin, and west of the city that still bears the name of this ancient body of water. Every house occupied its space freely, without a grid, without structure. The houses held together in fragile balance, for they were a grounded assortment of materials and construction techniques: tin, cement, wood, brick, glass, and tarp. Every possible combination was set up in the middle of a vast plateau, lined with patchy, dry grass, dry like the seasonal air. Some had been recently demolished, for clouds of dust hovered over them. Now uninhabited and neglected, these torn huts left mountains of rubble behind them: shattered wooden beams, bricks devoured by the salt in the air, fragmented plaster planks, shreds of cloth, rusty metallic fragments, various kinds of foam, all dispersed yet together enough to be identified as remainders of one single ensemble.  [...]

Dereliction

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At the entrance of Lake Texcoco Ecological Park, there’s a map explaining the premises: a gym, playgrounds, cabins, historic monuments, soccer, baseball, and volleyball courts, lakes, bike routes. You can also see on the map a red dot stating “you are here,” and in a corner, the Conagua logo. The park, located further in, lies in the middle of an ecological reserve, like a hidden ghost amongst the trees. The park is a specter that weeds and brush have devoured with the passing of time. Snails have invaded it and stagnant puddles of rainwater turn it bleak. The sunlight, the air, and the salt coughed up from the ground all have taken their toll. Along the park’s roads, the light posts watch over the perimeter like guardians of a land no one has treaded in years. Each post is crowned by a solar cell, but, at night, the park needs no artificial light. A bluish-gray wooden cabin, standing on high stilts, completes now more than four years of solitary life.  [...]

Desert

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The movie Black Wind shows the building process for the railways connecting the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California in the middle of the desert, towards 1947. Between sandstorms, under a sizzling sun hitting the heads of workers, engineers, and supervisors, each character develops an untamable will to sow industry in this arid land. The absence of water and flora is total. The rails are fastened to the ground, segment by segments, while the men stay standing between the open sky and the soft, dry, volatile sand.

The barren land that propels the movie’s plot was partly recorded in the Sonora desert. Some of the scenes were produced in a region similar in attributes to that of northern Mexico, just next to the Federal District. During the shooting, the ecological reserve and bulwark of the last lots belonging to Lake Texcoco was a wide plateau of salty soil where there was no water, flora, nor urban developments for miles around.  [...]

Desiccation

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Around the planet, from China to the Bolivian region that borders with Chile, lakes have turned  into a gauge of human incidence on the geography: as they dry up and shrink, the water and the basins’ surroundings change in shape and color until they transform into altogether different places. These sites acquire different colorings, some spots rise, some sink, erode or flood in unforeseeable configurations. The regions they ascribe to also change. Sometimes the previously warm color tones of a patch of land with a lake at the center become dotted with cold hues when the lake disappears. Sometimes an area where the blue reflection of water covered everything in green and violet, turns yellowish and red as the center of the lake dries up. The desiccation of a lake acts like a domino spreading its reach the way the pieces topple one another, until the most remote one falls: provinces, regions, districts, counties, and entire states are affected by the decrease in the water level of a lagoon.  [...]

Dispossession

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During a round-table discussion, César del Valle, one of the leaders of the People’s Front for the Defense of the Land (FPDT), asked the audience: “What is dispossession?” Some thirty people congregated in a small auditorium to talk about the possible consequences of the construction of the New Mexico City International Airport in the Texcoco basin. On the pine-wood surface of a table lay an open map, crisscrossed by folding lines. The map showed the northeastern region of the state of Mexico, strewn with partitions outlining different lands, one of top of the other. On the upper right side of the huge sheet, an area highlighted in red stood out, drawn over other lots marked by dotted lines. According to the measurements at the margins of the map, a triangle of some ninety hectares appeared under the legend: “Lots of the Atenco ejido under dispute with the NAICM.”  [...]

Ditch

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Mexico City residents have dug several ditches around and inside the area Lake Texcoco occupied for several centuries. In 1607, they dug a ditch north of the lakes of the Central Mexican basin to try to drain all of their water and dry up new stretches of land for urbanization. In 1629, a great flood caused its collapse. Its frail structure was erased as the water level rose in the rivers and lakes that took up great spreads of land in the Valley of Mexico. After the failure of the first ditch, a new canal was dug to drain the metropolitan area in the early 20th century. This subterranean Great Canal crossed the lake land south to north, directing the lacustrine water towards the Tula River, into the Mezquital Valley, in the state of Hidalgo.

As the city grew, a series of underground aquifers shrank in size. Their water was extracted through shallow wells: a well is a sort of vertical ditch that opens the land until it reaches down into one of the reservoirs. As the ground sank as a result of the vertical channels pumping water out, the Great Canal yielded, sloping the wrong way, causing the water’s return to the lakes. [...]

Duck

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Currently demarcated as an ecological reserve, the area surrounding the Nabor Carrillo Reservoir is inhabited by native birds year round and migrant birds during the winter. According to some avifauna experts who have studied the birds resting in the trees, this spot in the Valley of Mexico is the most important in the area for birds in migration. Thousands of these animals—mainly ducks like the greater scaup, the blue-winged teal, the brown teal, the ruddy duck, the pintail, the American wigeon, and the canvasback—rest on the water of this reservoir in groups of a couple hundreds, floating, making it their home for a few months.

Migrations are processes of long aerial journeys, implying sometimes flying over uninterrupted stretches of ocean and deserted land. The flight periods are long, and with short rest stops. Flocks of birds arrive each year to the same spot, certain that they will return the next, knowing somehow that the following generations will traverse exactly the same path: thousands of miles covered only to fly back. [...]