ENCYCLOPEDIA

Pier

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The Nabor Carrillo Reservoir, a human-built lagoon shaped like a flawless rectangle, lies in the middle of an enormous span of land which, a few decades before, contained water from the original lake of Texcoco. A lake nested on a lake. The “artificial” one is a perfectly defined geometrical shape. The “natural” one is an ever-changing outline bent on disappearing. In the middle of Nabor Carrillo an island was erected, and on its surface, a cabin. Next to the island, on top of a few surfacing rocks, a couple of flamingos—emblematic survivors of the ancient lake’s disappearance—built its nest. On the shore of this new lake, a pier was built, to provide mooring for potential boats. This should enable short trips to the island, bringing in visitors, athletes, biologists, tourists, and boat enthusiasts. The boards and columns of the pier were all painted light blue: the recently created National Water Commission (Conagua) had just arrived at the terrains of Lake Texcoco, replacing both the Ministry of Hydraulic Resources and the Lake Texcoco Commission: these institutions defined the lake’s territorial borders in 1971, anticipating the future of this site. Conagua left its mark on all constructions, painting everything light blue, touting its specificity by means of an institutional color.  [...]

Project

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In the library that stores the institutional memory of Lake Texcoco, inside the Conagua offices in San Juan de Aragón, there are facsimile files of all kinds of projects written since 1971. There, one may find the reports of the few projects still in place, including initiatives with an ecological approach. Such initiatives promised future transformations for this land, which today seem matters of a distant past. There are also printed copies of projects started and cancelled, facsimiles of the ones that never materialized, and examples of the ones that were impossible to carry out. Among the latter, there is a metal-ring-bound album with a red leather cover, the blueprint for a housing project to be built in Lake Texcoco. None of the pages is dated, but from the seal of the Ministry of Hydraulic Resources on the cover, it is inferred the album was compiled between the late seventies and early eighties. On each one of the pages and in the footnotes of the hand-drawn blueprints, the word “Coplasa” is written in bold letters, all-caps, without serifs.  [...]

Repurposing

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The organic waste cast out by Mexico City is piled under plastic membrane surfaces, to be later compressed as a new layer of land in a sedimentation process called “relleno sanitario” (literally, “sanitation filling,” i.e. landfills). In spite of being compacted and confined to demarcated areas, the landfills are still metropolitan surfaces with an undesirable and problematic use of the soil. Developers have modified this land use by building on top of these sites, forcing the gaze up to high rises lined with glass. Thus, we forget the new project rests on a thick layer of compacted waste. This is the case of Santa Fe, in western Mexico City: a financial district with tall buildings standing on landfills. Ciudad Jardín Bicentenario, close to the current airport, is another case of such repurposed land: a sports complex with a mall, erected on the ancient Xochiaca landfill, east of the city. If a cross-section of Ciudad Jardín’s ground was made, the upper layers would reveal a confusing, even unstable morphology, considering the fact that the neighborhood where this complex stands was built on the bed of an enormous desiccated lake.  [...]

Rubble

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The border between Lake Texcoco’s Federal Enclosure and the towns of San Luis Huexotla and San Bernardino extends today like a wasteland comprising a number of hectares, covered only by the salt emanating from the earth, patchy grass, and piles of rubble scattered far and wide. Many hectares remain free from occupation, expectant, unresolved, as if not belonging to any of the territories reclaiming them. In border zones such as this, or as in the U.S.-Mexico border, there always exists a strip of vacant land which, of its own accord, effaces the evidence of human activity. The rubble—these isolated, worthless chunks—are witnesses to erased human life, remaining the only thing that resists annihilation along this border-world.

For the first two decades of the 21st century, the southeastern strip of Lake Texcoco has shifted between appropriation and expropriation, constructions and evictions, demarcation and openness. During this period, homes were built and communities were organized.  [...]

Ruin

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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.  [...]

Salt

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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.  [...]

Shore

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The Nabor Carrillo Reservoir can be seen from an airplane: when entering the state of Mexico’s airspace from the east, the reservoir appears like a strange, black, rectangular stain, like a dam, an unexplainably clear territory, covered with a dark, shiny substance. Seen from an airplane flying over Mexico City airspace, the perfect geometry of the reservoir stands out in the messy urban stain spreading a few miles west. Residents of the city and its surroundings do not visit the biggest water rectangle in the Valley of Mexico: Nabor Carrillo is protected by barriers restricting the access to strangers, so that only biologists, agronomists, and federal employees assigned to the area know its orthogonal basin for processed water.  [...]

State Of Mexico

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Mexico is made of an ensemble of states with relative autonomy, granted by a federal government. Each state has its own constitution and jurisdiction. The political map of the country represents the states as clearly demarcated areas. At the nation’s center there is, however, an exception to this organized political geography: a state embedded in another one like a stain of sorts. Bearing the name of the country, the state of Mexico shelters another state inside it: Mexico City, the city-state, the megalopolis, the capital. Seen from the metropolis, the state of Mexico is a surrounding ring, a belt, a margin of sorts. With an exponential growth over the last decades, the capital has overflown this belt, making it dense, overpopulated, and forcefully urbanized by the demands of an unstoppably growing population. The border areas between city and state have become indistinguishable and confusing, especially in the explosion of the urban center towards the geographical north.  [...]

Subsidence

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In July, 1965, Lake Texcoco looked more like a desert than a lake. Thousands of hectares were taking the shape of an immense wasteland in the margins of a rapidly-sprawling city. The lakebed was being imagined as a clean slate of infinite possibilities. These possibilities were always thought as extensions, prosthetic limbs, or utopic projections of the city: even the idea of building a park, a stretch of green meadows, trees, and trails, constituted an exercise in taming, designing, demarcating a place which would otherwise spread and contract at will, disregarding the needs of humans. Back then, engineer Nabor Carrillo was able to carry out studies on ground sinking on a small portion of these still-unsegmented lands, south of what back then was the Peñón-Texcoco local road. Carrillo was the first to realize the city was sinking, and that this fact was directly bound to the way it (still) gets its water.  [...]

Subway

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Line 7 of the subway is the deepest one of the entire underground transportation network of Mexico City: to take a train headed to Barranca del Muerto or El Rosario, three flights of stairs must be used. Each of them is as high as three overlapping basements. The temperature rises as the bodies of all the passengers enter the tunnels, stepping into ever deeper geological strata. The trains stop at the platform and the passengers crowd the edge, trying to shove their way into the train car. The platform may sit just under the clay layers sheltering a shallow aquifer, in the middle of the first rocky layers of this portion of the Earth’s crust. The train drives underground, north to south, under the foundations of buildings in the western side of the city. In Tacubaya, this line intersects with lines 1 and 9, causing a swarm of people. Like foam, they push in and out of the open train cars: closer to the surface, changing from one line to the other, climbing from one stratum to the other.  [...]

Symbol

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The myth of the foundation of Tenochtitlan is known outside Mexico because of the national emblem’s central image: an enormous eagle perched on a blossoming cactus which bends under the bird’s weight. With its beak and one of its legs, the bird holds a snake that tries to break free. The snake coils and uncoils, challenging the eagle with its eyes. This image is inscribed in a circle made of letters that form the words “ESTADOS UNIDOS MEXICANOS” (“United States of Mexico”). It is the symbol of a nation’s power, multiplied in thousands of flags waving every September throughout the territory; turned into the letterhead of all official documents; set as the center of the decoration in all diplomatic events. Thus, the eagle, the snake, and the cactus become a flat image, a diagram, a logo.  [...]

Telephone

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A telephone speaker emerges from the 1985 earthquake’s ruins, scattered and half-hidden as they are in several spots of ancient Lake Texcoco. The rubble forms heaps of light-colored construction materials, which were formerly used by families dwelling in middle class houses until the day of the earthquake. The construction materials of those houses, turned into rubble by the strength of the quake, are increasingly harder to find in the homogeneous and tiny constructions of contemporary apartments, erected as a replacement of those crumbled homes. In the new apartments, the “walls” are built as voids lined with thin sheetrock planks, made of plaster and compressed sawdust, protected by vinyl resembling the color and the grain of pine wood. The reinforcements are made of anodized tin. On the other hand, the walls of sturdy cement, stone blocks, hand-painted ceramic tiles, the shattered granite and marble scattered in different sites in the lakebed, are all part of the past. Gone is the architecture of long-lasting, dense, heavy, detailed materials, covered with delicate ornaments. [...]

Tepalcate

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Close to the limit between the Federal Enclosure of Lake Texcoco and the San Bernardino ejido there is a surveillance booth on a heap of dirt. The booth is painted with the institutional colors of Mexico’s National Water Commission: white and light blue for the walls, and red for the gable roof. Next to the booth there is a weed-covered lot, crossed by furrows perhaps drawn by a plow. A few meters away from the booth there is a fence made of wire and concrete stakes. On the other side of the fence, in the ejido, some hen run around in the tall grass. There are some scattered constructions. The heap of dirt supporting the booth stands out like a protuberance a meter high or less. It rises visibly over a plateau miles wide. In the soil, some brown chunks crack when treaded upon: they’re shards of broken vases, clayware, jugs, shapeless figurines, all buried in the middle of the field. The ceramic fragments sprinkled with the soil’s black hue were once dinnerware: in Mexico, this pre-Hispanic ceramic is still referred to with the Náhuatl word tepalcate. [...]

Tezontle

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Exploring the lateral wings of Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology, I found a small display with an anthropomorphic figure on a small wooden pedestal, next to a couple of ceramic vases. It looked different from the pieces I had seen in other halls, where Mexican archaeology surprises by both the scale and the pristine quality of the stone surfaces. On the contrary, these small and modest objects were splattered with red stains the color of human blood. The cultures occupying the zone that now is the state of Mexico mined for iron in Huahuaxtla and Huitzuco (in the neighboring state of Guerrero). They transported it back to their cities in heavy, large flagons. By macerating mineral fragments with stone mortars, the iron was reduced to a thin dust to be scattered over ritual and funerary objects, with the purpose of infusing their deceased ones with life beyond their earthly existence. The archaeological site where the blood-stained pieces were retrieved is in the state of Mexico, which is also the site for the extraction of tezontle: a volcanic rock made from magma, cooled down by millenary processes, porous like a sponge, red like the ritual figurines animating the dead. [...]

Thing

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A month before Conagua yielded part of its lands over for the construction of the New Mexico City International Airport, we went to pay a last visit to the animals, trees, and plants still found in that lot. We grew familiar with some of the species which had slowly adapted to the place. We observed the salty, grassy plateaus which were populated by conifers, rosemary, hares, and packs of wild dogs that fled the humans. By the tip of this triangle adjacent to Ecatepec, we saw some ponds formed by the August rain, covered with different bird species: at the edges, under the stones, black widows and snails peeped out. Flies swarmed inches away from the water. In the old water still, built next to the ponds, the water currents from neighborhood markets deposited seeds on the ground, spawning tomatoes, chards, chili, melon, and innumerable herb species. We turned around and found the rubble of the booths built by the National Water Commission to guard the proper behavior of this self-balancing, autonomous ecosystem. Other constructions erected by the State stood every few kilometers, already crumbling and confused with the dust wafted by the ground. Behind the rubble of these old (though recent) constructions, the road rollers and bulldozers returned the soil to its arid state, sweeping and stomping the land. [...]

Town

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The state of Mexico’s northeastern towns are all tied together: it’s difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. The streets are narrow, and flanked by single-story houses. On some outer walls there are paintings of rural motifs, worn by time: Emiliano Zapata portraits, political mottos, phrases repeated in several colors and fonts. Some houses have brick facades. Others, metal gates painted with electrostatic enamel. As the car slowly drives into one of the towns, following the pace of load trucks, the streets become narrow labyrinths with dead ends. We may be in Atenco, Nexquipayac, or Tocuila, municipalities bound by streets that have a different names on each side of the imaginary border, or even keep the same name through it. People walk down the narrow stone and cement sidewalks. The stores are open, displaying announcements handwritten or printed in colorful tarps. A smell of food wafts into the moving car. In the center of each town there is a square, a church, and fruit stands that show up under red tents some days of the week. [...]

Translation

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I’m an intermediate realm between what you remember, know, observe, and imagine. I move in strides between several temporalities; the past, the present, the future. Sometimes I join two remote eras in a single phrase. I form in the clefts between elements parted by silences, measuring these distances with different tools: concepts, data, arguments, similes, ellipsis, and metaphors. I also draw connecting lines between disparate realities, bringing them closer, revealing resemblances, resonances, or secret links. Sometimes I’m called narrator, text, voice, or fiction. When I’m fiction I become a world of my own, a hybrid of thought’s subtle matter, the dense matter of elements claiming their right to be named. I thus invoke a set of affects when these opposing matters are brought closer, like electricity is induced. [...]

Vision

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Let’s imagine we live in the Valley of Mexico in another time. Imagine we walk the streets of the biggest city of this valley with our present body, feeling they’re busier with pedestrians and traffic. We may observe soft and smooth surfaces covering the streets like mirrors. Imagine the changes hundreds of years of human and non-human lives and journeys have inscribed in the urban relics of Mexico City’s historical center: the cracks, the fallen stones, the washed-off colors of the facades, the crumbling, ancient buildings beset by neon signs, disappearing behind light bulbs and acrylic plates. Imagine we walk among crowds who speak a language we don’t understand. Imagine the sounds of new vehicles and the silences of those who’re absent. [...]

Water

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Greetings: I am Water. I am always changing, mutating. For that reason, my voice sometimes mixes up with that of solids, of soil, even with the voices from the sky: there is a bit of me contained in most things, stuck to the molecules of other elements. I am inside you as well, going through you, cleansing you, carrying nutrients, then exiting you as waste. I am that which connects you to all and everything else, which makes you belong to a totality; I am that fluid which erases your frontiers, your boundaries. I am the most volatile of elements, yet at the same time, the most present; your savior and your destroyer. [...]

Water Carrier

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On a stereoscopic photograph taken in 1892, owned by the Princeton University Library, appear a man and a woman dressed in attire made of cotton, walking the streets of Guanajuato in full sunlight, each with a water pitcher on their back. A stereoscopic photograph shows us a double reality that consolidates in the brain of the observer. These kinds of pictures manifest the fabricated character of the stories we tell through them, for in principle they are not an image, but a pair of images: two images which happen to be apparently identical. Each image, however, is slightly displaced with respect to the other; each contains a relative distortion facing the other. Both images constitute each a version of the other, and are at the same time an incomplete part of the other. They only turn into a sole image by the mediation of a unifying device, only obtaining visual depth by means of an optical illusion. [...]