Animism

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. [...]

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Archaeology

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.  [...]

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Archive

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. [...]

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Birdstrike

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.  [...]

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Bond

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.  [...]

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Building

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.  [...]

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Coordinate

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. [...]

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Dust Cloud

In the late 1960s, Lake Texcoco remained dry most of the year. During the rainy season, its basin would fill up and spill onto the city, flooding its main streets, although only for a couple of months. The remaining part of the year the ground would dry out. Its grains of dust and salt were exposed to sunlight and wind. This wind would lift the thicker grains and drag them along at ground level, baring the underlying layer. Blowing in all directions, the wind would lift the dust to then thrust it to the ground. Localized explosions of aeolic erosion fractured the soil. When coarser particles hit the ground, finer ones would then rise in huge veils of dust which thickened into veritable walls. The volatile particles of these “walls” rose further, in the shape of clouds. They were manipulated by the softer wind currents and driven back towards Mexico City at very high speeds. These tolvaneras (“dust clouds”) happened around 33 times a year and were as strong as the sandstorms in the Sahara Desert.  [...]

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Highway

In the 16th century, Lake Texcoco was an uninterrupted body of water that stretched all the way to the edge of the Chapultepec Forest in the west and over to the limit of the Texcoco Kingdom in the east. In the maps from that era, it is depicted as a wide-reaching circle that contains a large blue surface dotted only by the small island of Tenochtitlan. As the desiccation initiated, the lake was displaced to the Texcoco region, in an attempt to drive it out of the city. In spite of this, it largely remained one body, one single patch, although parted by straight and diagonal lines that progressively adapted to the political divisions of the neighboring grounds. At the beginning of the 20th century, the borders of the lake where reduced to edges and lines drawn with the neatness and sovereignty of the fast-growing urban territories. These territories were spilling onto each other and set up barriers to contain each other’s encroachment. Rather than an edge that follows the curves of the water touching the land, the lake became a combination of polygons, isosceles triangles, and perfect circles, measurable by the devices of Euclidean geometry. Towards the 70s, once it was depleted, the lake became a great desert of white, uninterrupted soil, framed by the growing neighborhoods of the outskirts, tucked between the city and the ring formed by the state of Mexico around it: the fusion of a polygon, a circle and a rectangle.  [...]

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Hare

Wearing reflective vests and jeans, the biologist consultants of the Mexico City Airport Group caught a hare between the bushes of what will become the third runway of the New Mexico City International Airport, in a remote location north of former Lake Texcoco. These consultants have been hired by the new airport’s builders to minimize the number of animals and plants killed by road rollers, layers of compacted tezontle rock, or the asphalt serving as substrate for numerous airplane landings. This search is more symbolic than effective, given the size of the land and the time remaining before the schedule brushes aside the environmental impact agenda: many small animals will be accidentally buried as anonymous casualties. With the accelerated pace of soil change brought along by the construction, the creatures will virtually be fossils by the airport’s opening date. The scientific name of the animal is Lepus californicus, known in Spanish as “liebre cola negra” (black-tailed jackrabbit).  [...]

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Industry

In December 2014, the Compañía Harinera Nacional (National Flour Company) still carried out its operations in an old factory located in the neighborhood of San Simón Tolnáhuac, a couple of blocks away from the Tlatelolco subway station, in Mexico City. At 11 p.m. on December 4th, the neighbors of the flour factory felt the temperature rising, as smoke and flashes of light seemed to come out of the industrial building. Within minutes, a neighbor captured with his phone camera the shocking view of a burning factory: almost an entire block wide, the Harinera Nacional’s silhouette was framed by high yellow flames and the noise of crumbling structures, shattered buildings, and walls yielding to the heat’s pressure. The firefighters arrived at midnight. Once the fire was put out, they found the building hadn’t been used or visited in days, or even weeks. The plant, the mill and the lab seemed unscathed, except for some incinerated tables and some posters hanging on the walls, showing wheat varieties, maps of Mexico, and images of the city from the time when the rivers still crossed the neighborhoods. There was no equipment, no machines, no infrastructure to be saved, as if the factory had been purposefully abandoned later to be burned.  [...]

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Invasive Species

In the Community of Madrid area, in Spain, there can be found a number of invasive plants that have become household presences in the local flora. Species such as Acacia dealbata, Lonicera japonica, Eucalyptus, Vinca difformis, and Lantana camara have rapidly naturalized. These plants can be thought of as the vegetal counterpart of a series of human migrations that have been introduced to the European continent in the last quarter century, many of them from the Americas. Migrations of plants and animals, less notorious and longer in span, are of a very different nature than those of humans: the latter arrive hastily to set foot upon a strange, possibly more fertile land, adapting silently to the conditions of their new environment. They settle into the clefts, find fissures where they introduce themselves with difficulty, and are sometimes subject to the way of life natives impose. In this sense, human migrants are survivors. Migrations of plants and animals, on the contrary, appropriate the foreign environment, rapidly modifying their growth patterns according to the soil conditions, profiting from the weaknesses of native species.  [...]

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Land

Between 2012 and 2013, I spent long hours working on a project in the Bogotá Central Cemetery. This cemetery was built at the end of the 19th century, conceived as a set of three adjacent lots located in the Santa Fe neighborhood, right in the heart of the city. During Enrique Peñalosa’s first term as mayor, which coincided with the turn of this century, one of the lots was repurposed as a park, in the context of a public space regeneration plan. The strategy was to produce ample concrete squares that would cover the entire lot, except for a tree or two and some iconic modern sculptures. It was named Renaissance Park, even though the foundations of a former cemetery lie underneath. It had been, moreover, the kind of cemetery which served as a transition between the informal burials of old and the orderly parceling of modern tombs. Thus, this site sheltered older corpses under the foundations of the demolished mausoleums.  [...]

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Map

The land of the Lake Texcoco Ecological Reserve is located right after the line that separates Mexico City from the State of Mexico, to the northeast. Upon crossing this dividing line, many borders are simultaneously crossed. You go over a political division between city and non-city, in which all traces of urbanization disappear abruptly. There is also the crossing of a geographical division between city and countryside, the urban and the rural: a saline country of scarce vegetation, a flat, open plateau, alien to the intricate, sunken topography of Mexico City. A climate border is also crossed, perhaps the most surprising, as it is felt by one’s body: as one goes from the city to the state, temperature rises a couple of degrees, pollution decreases, and the air dries up noticeably and starts smelling of salt.  [...]

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Michoacán

The boxes containing the collection of the Animist Museum of Lake Texcoco were opened in November 2017, in the city of Morelia, Michoacán. The museum’s collection comprises chunks of rock, dry plants, building rubble, objects, and tools salvaged from the lacustrine ground of the central Mexican basin, which is now dry, fragmented, populated by diverse materialities. These objects will travel from city to city in the following years, from showroom to showroom, from audience to audience. They will travel in boxes that shift while the truck hauling them drives down highways full of curves and accidents. The objects in transit move away from one another, draw near, and collide.  [...]

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Mine

Some communities still dwelling on the ancient eastern shore of Lake Texcoco, like those located in the base of Tláloc Hill, consider the water to be an element that emerges from the depths of the earth to then stream down of the tip of mountains. Geologists consider all the elevations in the terrestrial crust are sculpted by the repetitive trajectory of water, on its course from the tops to the valleys, thereby drawing multiple contours and geological attributes. The vision developed in the quotidian experience of hillside dwellers—who walk on a hill and live in it— agrees with the vision of the scientist—who observes all from the distance of scholarly study—in that they both acknowledge the existence of an intimate collaboration between land and water. The hills, especially those made of spongy structures like tezontle, are water-bloated reservoirs that surge from underneath. These hills have rounded tips, and water streams from the highest point down. Water runs effortlessly down the slope of a mountain, filling furrows that geography itself opens as trails, creating slithering water streams that reach the lower lands and spread along the valleys with the force supplied by gravity.  [...]

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Monument

Lake Texcoco presented itself to Hernán Cortés as an enormous inner sea: from the shoreline that today is but a dot on a busy street of the city of Texcoco, the conqueror observed that the lake’s “tide” rose and sank between rainy and dry seasons. He was surprised to find that, in its immense surface, the opposite shore was out of sight, showing the lake as an uninterrupted ocean losing itself in the horizon. In this exact place, it seems, Cortés unloaded the dismantled ships he had been carrying along, to then re-assemble them. He would sail the salty waters and conquer Tenochtitlan with his fleet of colossal vessels. The Bridge of the Brigs Memorial, that anonymous landmark in the city of Texcoco, signals the lake’s shore towards 1521, in the early days of the Valley of Mexico conquest. This monument today comprises a column made of stone, crowned by a spire and an etched plaque. It’s located in the middle of a esplanade of about ten square meters, framed by three pink walls, a couple of park benches, and a plant vase. On the walls of the small plaza there are two cursive inscriptions in bronze, not entirely readable, since a few letters have been removed, probably to cast them and sell their weight as metal.  [...]

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Movement

In October 1985, several rubble-loaded trucks headed to the northeastern highway out of the Federal District. The waste of constructions destroyed by the earthquake from a few weeks before now wobbled on the back of the trucks. They drove slowly, all the way from the Nuevo León apartment building in Tlatelolco. What nowadays is the Peñón-Texcoco Highway, was then only a deserted road the vehicles used to gain the Federal Enclosure of Lake Texcoco. The site was mostly idle, a demi-desert. Once inside, and split in many directions, the loads were dumped to the ground: when falling, the shape of a column or a staircase was glimpsed among tons of nondescript chunks. Among the rubble, some objects could be seen that, thirty years after, are still found in the salty surface of the lakebed: shreds of fabric, dresses, shoe heels, ceramic shards, and other unidentifiable objects squashed between wall slats.  [...]

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Ruin

I am not a thing, but a state of all things built. I am the inevitable fate of everything which is altered by human hands, the fall of everything that rises. Human excitement about the future—that optimistic impulse to create lasting things, to change the world, so that the footprint of a single species lasts on Earth—makes me sad and pitiful. Although I appear before their eyes in the subtlest to the most catastrophic ways, humans prefer not to see me. Or, if they do, they forget me hastily. So many cities have fallen, leaving pieces of me on the ground. I appear so often in the form of destroyed buildings, of shipwrecks buried in the bottom of the sea... For centuries I have been present in everything and in all human stories.  [...]

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Salt

I am the salt of Lake Texcoco. When the soil dries out, I appear like a white layer of snow, conspicuous at ground level. When I blend with the water of the artificial lakes that now populate this vast land, I become invisible, unnoticeable. I am a combination of sodium and chloride, yet I am never pure: I mix with the ground and its minerals, with the residues flying over from the city. When I am volatile, I even blend into the air. Sometimes they call me tequesquite, when I coalesce into gray crusts on the ground that become cracked and lift up like flakes. The Nahua peoples gave me that name as they set foot on this ground, for I give the earth the aspect of a surfacing stone, of dust magically rising in the shape of crystals.  [...]

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