ENCYCLOPEDIA

Hare

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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).  [...]

History

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Archaeologists Jeffrey Parsons and Luis Morett specialized in the period of the Aztec culture before the arrival of Spaniards to the Valley of Mexico. They extended their studies beyond the perimeter of Tenochtitlan onto northwestern Lake Texcoco. Specifically, their research covers the currently protected federal lands that border with Chimalhuacán and Texcoco, all the way to the northern zone that has now been licensed for the construction of the recently devised New Mexico City International Airport, bordering to the east with Atenco. Between 1982 and 1992, Parsons and Morett explored on foot more than 8,000 hectares of semi-desert terrains belonging to the former lake. These lands were covered with tequesquite (a type of salty underground emanation), and partially lined with grass and some conifer species. They walked for miles, compiling information for a study about traditional means of salt production, which was apparently abundant along the lake’s perimeter.  [...]

House

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Several miles away from downtown Mexico City, there are still evidences of more than 800 homes that apparently existed until 2012 beside Lake Texcoco, in the salty plateau of the Hidalgo y Carrizo lot. These houses stood on this seemingly uninhabitable terrain, with no infrastructure, no close connection to the urban life style. There are no documents, images, or maps referencing them: their existence has not been signaled. It is possible that dogs and wild hares lived by the houses. It’s also possible that spiders, scorpions, snakes, ants, and other minuscule dwellers haunted these human settlements, but not enough to make them retreat.

From afar, the houses’ remainders appear like gleaming dots on the sandy, salty ground: a layer of glass fragments reflects the sunlight like a mirror, lining the land like an unruly, translucent mosaic.  [...]

Hum

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When you live in Mexico City, moments of silence occur when the metropolis’s noise wanes, but they are always strewn with a hum. It may be the humming of refrigerators throbbing in unison, filtering out of the cracks of house doors. The housing of these appliances cause the objects inside them to reverberate like sizeable drums. In large numbers, they slightly shake the land, by letting out deep vibrations that first thud on your body and then on the ears. It can be the sound of electric pumps installed in buildings to shoot water up from the underground to the cisterns on the rooftops. It can be the voices of people chit-chatting, coming from different directions to your hearing field. It can also be the humming of electric cables strewn along streets, suspended in the air and meeting around the sidewalks’ steeping posts. The cables let out screeches, as if about to burst into a short circuit. When traveling, electricity also emits a humming through the light sockets, when the voltage fluctuates momentarily.  [...]

Human

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Ernesto Carrillo has been my guide throughout the exploration of Lake Texcoco’s land. He always wears denim, a leather belt, and dapper, ironed, white-and-blue stripped shirts. The sun shines strongly on the day of our first visit. In skin types like mine, the sun may leave red marks for days. A wide-brimmed straw hat protects his head. Sheltered by the shade, the skin of this elderly, slender man, looks tanned by years of sunlight and dryness. It’s the thick, brown skin of a race stronger than mine on the account of his proximity to the countryside and the mountain. Ernesto has walked this land since it became a waterless, grassless desert, more than twenty years ago. He’s an agricultural engineer from the neighboring Chapingo University, a fact he brings up during his first handshake, along with a gesture of pride and a broad smile. When I met him, he spoke also about the history of this plateau since the time of his ancestors.  [...]

Industry

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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.  [...]

Invasive Species

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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.  [...]

Land

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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.  [...]

Landfill

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The West Landfill is a garbage dump covering an extension of several square kilometers, bordering with Nezahualcóyotl City and the Mexico City Benito Juárez Airport. The ground it now occupies was once part of ancient Lake Texcoco, and belongs to the land protected by the Mexican federal government under the same name. The trash in this landfill is compacted in platforms one meter high, which also function as a levee for a reservoir called Lake Churubusco. The lake takes in wastewater coming from the sewage in the surroundings. The water is black and oily; gas bubbles up to the surface. I spot some small, thin, limp birds sitting on the ripples, rummaging in the rubbish. The mouth of the main sewage pipe produces a white, dense, abundant foam that flows over to the lake’s shores, landing at our feet. Neighborhoods of this state of Mexico municipality are separated from the landfill by a wall and several strings of barbed wire. A prison also borders the wall: surveillance towers loom at the opposite side of the landfill, anticipating the escape of inmates towards the waste fields. [...]

Landscape

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U.S. artist and land art pioneer Robert Smithson was 35 years old when he died in a plane crash in 1973. The airplane dipped while the artist observed his work Amarillo Ramp in the state of Texas, rising on top of a broken circle more than a hundred meters in diameter, in the middle of one of the vastest settings of North America. I imagine him tumbling in his infinite, vertical, slightly winding downfall, to a plateau of dry land and dust clouds merging with the clouds in the sky. I picture the burning sunlight bouncing off millions of crystals. Then the muffled roar of the plane breaking to pieces upon touching the land and the explosion throwing a ball of flames towards the limpid blue sky. I imagine what it would be like to die in the middle of those confines, with no human life for miles around: when a plane hits the ground, everything becomes faceless matter, a combustion of flesh and metal thundering into the plateau. The encounter of a human with a land such as that of Texas happens with the harshness of an accident. [...]

Levelling

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At the outset of construction on an uneven terrain—with basins, elevations, or mere slopes—it is necessary to carry out a process of ground levelling. This often implies bringing in outside materials, shredded into pieces small enough to successfully cover the gaps. After a decree was issued in 1971 for the institution of Lake Texcoco’s Federal Enclosure, hundreds of hectares covering the muddy bottom of the ancient lake were cleared and left idle, prompting all kinds of infrastructural, real estate, and touristic projects: the dusty Conagua (National Water Commission) archives shelter the copies of typewritten development projects for Lake Texcoco, proposed soon after the new territory was instituted. Once the lake was desiccated, the patch of land represented on sheets of paper was rumpled, and flattened again. Correspondingly, the land needed levelling, even if not assigned to any concrete project. The sheer openness of idle land incites its occupants to tame and homogenize it, rendering it available: pure possibility, pure future.    [...]   

Map

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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.  [...]

Michoacán

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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.  [...]

Mine

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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.  [...]

Monument

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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.  [...]

Movement

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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.  [...]

Mud

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An earthquake is in a way a dance between two tectonic plates. One moves towards the other and the latter retracts, animated by the impulse of the opposing plate. One tucks itself under or beside the other, and while they settle, they send energy upward, animating everything they sustain, shaking the land in tremors, in sways. For thousands of years, the Cocos and North American Plates have coexisted under the Valley of Mexico, in the tension preceding the dance. Every so often, they stoke each other, moving subtly, thus slowly changing the setup of the board sitting on the Earth’s surface: volcanoes, valleys, rivers, lakes, mountains, and, more recently, a city that stands like a cardboard scale model, wobbling between two uneven tables. This human-scale model sinks at its very center with the weight of concrete and rock, as it sits on the bottom of a desiccated lake: a floor made of mud, algae, water, salt, and microorganisms sedimented for millennia.  [...]

Museum

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There is a collection of carefully selected materials, gathered in different spots of ancient Lake Texcoco. Among ruins of multiple government projects, abandoned during the last forty years in the lake lands, there are all kinds of objects: heaps of rubble, building foundations, scattered ruins of crumbled houses, dry wells full with trash, broken fences of an empty stable, rusty tools, fallen pillars, unreadable signs, objects hidden in the grass, documents with the corners torn and stained by the sun.

These and other materials were located in a series of excavations during which salt and dirt were removed from their surfaces. Gradually, the surfaces became recognizable in their differences. From their initial aspect of solid rubble chunks, a wide spectrum of consistencies and textures emerged. Some ancient materials that belonged to the bed of the disappeared lake were found, together with certain wall-like structures built in successive attempts at recovering the basin.  [...]

Office

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The Peñón-Texcoco Highway leads to the entrance of the management offices of Lake Texcoco’s Federal Enclosure. A guard stands behind a blue fence. Behind it, a single-story building stands: ample, horizontally spreading through its enormous, empty inner spaces. The Mexican Center for Water and Sanitation Training is, in a certain sense, the heart of the lake’s Federal Enclosure: its administrative heart, its political heart, and the only place legitimately occupied by humans. Inside, a group of people gathers, radically different from other groups that occupy neighboring zones east of this territory: the Lake Texcoco terrains separate the inhabitants of ejido rural properties from the dense, urban tissue of Mexico City. Parted by the 8,000 hectares of a yet uninhabited strip of land, without transportation infrastructure except for a wide freeway stretching all the way to the entrance of the city of Texcoco, the settlers of the land adjoining the lake have not followed the same patterns of growth and disaggregation that characterize municipalities such as Ecatepec or Nezahualcóyotl City (to this day at least). Some of these groups call themselves “pueblos:” many maintain an intimate relationship with their land, most of them being rural communities bond by blood, lineage, or a sense of belonging.  [...]

Park

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In an area of Lake Texcoco’s Federal Enclosure there is a football court, lined with stark green nylon grass. The field is empty, connected to other sports courts by trails. Next to them, there are wooden cabins, also deserted and idle. All of these constructions are part of a project which became urgent and polemic during the Presidency of Felipe Calderón. The Lake Texcoco Ecological Park was put forward alongside another project: Mexico, Future City. Both insisted in the need to recover a lacustrine area of the mostly dry Lake Texcoco, with the purpose of mitigating an imminent environmental impact the city had resisted for decades. Small variations differentiated one project from the other (the largest were probably political): they proposed, each one in its own way, a system of lakes and interconnected islands habilitating the ecological functions of a protected land. At the same time, both projects foresaw some uniform urbanizations (perhaps for the middle class), as well as different kinds of businesses. These projects aimed at setting up a new airport as the axis of the ensemble, in its center.  [...]