Tenochtitlan:
City of Water
Tenochtitlan is remembered as the capital of the brutal Aztec culture, the seat of an expansive pre-Columbian empire that appeased its gods through human sacrifice. While the Aztecs were fearsome warriors, the public imagination unfairly neglects the impressive engineering triumphs that made the city what it was — and, by extension, created the Aztec people themselves. In particular, the hydrological challenges the Aztecs faced and largely overcame shaped their relationships with each other, with their environment, and eventually with their conquerors. The sources listed below served my efforts in this paper to elucidate the development and the effects of that relationship.
Cortés, Hernán, Letters from Mexico, translated and edited by Anthony Pagden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Cortés seems a bit of an unreliable narrator of history, but his descriptions are rich in detail and, as he was one of the few Europeans to see Tenochtitlan in its glory, I wanted to include some highlights from his writings. He took an exploratory crew and used it as the foundation for the conquest of perhaps the most powerful New World civilization, without his king's permission, so the letters are a strange mix of self-aggrandizement and obsequiousness. Contrasting his accounts with those from Bernal Diaz and Sahagún's Aztec sources was illuminating.
Diaz, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Translated by J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1963.
Diaz wrote his history of the conquest, decades after having participated in it, in response to the memoirs of one of his fellow conquistadors, Gómara, whose account he felt sacrificed accuracy to tell a better story. He has a good eye for detail and includes descriptions of more mundane aspects of the places and events he witnessed. The battle descriptions include tactical discussion, useful for assessing how the Aztecs' watery environment affected their defense. His first impressions of Tenochtitlan were also vivid, though I ultimately used Cortés’s descriptions more.
Sahagún, Bernardino de. “Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex,” in We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Repertorium Columbianum), edited and translated by James Lockhart, 48-255. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Sahagún's
work, of which this is only the final volume, is phenomenal. He
pioneered the field of ethnography in creating this epic
collection of Nahuatl observations, beliefs, and history. This
volume in particular, covering much of the same material discussed
in Cortés letters, provides a necessary counterpoint to the
conqueror's narrative. I had hoped to locate a copy of the full
12-volume set to use as a reference, but it is rather difficult to
get a hold of (the UT library supposedly has one for reference
among their rare books, but I didn't confirm that). I was
overjoyed to find the entire Book 12 within We People Here, translated to
English alongside the original Nahuatl and Spanish.
Calnek, Edward E. "Settlement
Pattern and Chinampa Agriculture at Tenochtitlan." American Antiquity 37,
no. 1 (1972): 104-15. Accessed April 2, 2017.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/278892.
Calnek was one of the earlier scholars focused on postclassical Valley of Mexico civilizations, and everybody seems to cite him. This article is a solid explanation of chinampas: how they were developed, constructed, and maintained, and how they fit into the urban environment. It has specific information about Tenochtitlan's layout that I didn't use but might benefit others studying the city.
Durazo, Jaime and R.N. Farvolden.
“The Groundwater Regime of the Valley of Mexico from Historical
Evidence and Field Observations,” in Journal of Hydrology 112, 1-2 (December
1989): 171-190. Accessed March 27, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1694(89)90187-X.
This is a solid survey of the hydrogeology of the Valley of Mexico and some of the issues that the Aztecs (and those who came after) had to contend with. It's written with a technical audience in mind, with the goal of explicating the antecedents of Mexico City's current difficulties. While I didn't use it as a source as much as I had anticipated, the paper's organization helped me organize my own thoughts. It covers post-conquest developments as well.
León-Portilla, Miguel, ed. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
This anthology of mostly short excerpts from primary sources is arranged somewhat haphazardly by subject. It would make a good supplementary text for a course on the conquest. Influential when first published, as it was one of the earlier efforts to introduce indigenous voices into scholarship of the early history of New Spain. As might be expected, it helped me locate relevant material in more obscure texts; its brief quotes from The Florentine Codex solidified my resolve to add it to my primary sources.
Mundy, Barbara E. The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
This book is incredible. Highly readable, well cited, and insightful, it proved invaluable in describing the relationship between the Aztecs and water as viewed through multiple lenses, particularly the practical and the spiritual. The second chapter in particular, "Water and the Sacred," contains a wealth of information and genuinely deep analysis. The purpose of the book is to restore agency to the indigenous residents of Mexico City in shaping the urban environment post-conquest, but the author evaluates postclassical (pre-conquest) Tenochtitlan as part of the groundwork for that. Mundy's analysis helped me shape my thesis, and following the book's citations led to several other excellent sources, including Edward P. Calnek's article and the Florentine Codex. I first found mention of Mundy's work through the excellent website mexicolore.co.uk.
Pezzoli, Keith. Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Mexico City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000.
Another work that examines the past in an attempt to find solutions to modern problems. There seems to be a good bit of recent scholarship with this approach, particularly in urban and ecological design; this was the one most focused on the Valley of Mexico that I could locate. It seems like most scholarship regarding Aztec hydrological works is intended to inform modern hydrology in Mexico City. Much of the content isn't relevant to the course at all, but descriptions of the human ecology of Tenochtitlan were useful, and it specified yields for chinampa agriculture.
Raynal-Villasenor, Jose A. “The
Remarkable Hydrological Works of the Aztec Civilization,” in Water for the Future: Hydrology in
Perspective (Proceedings of the Rome Symposium, April 1987).
IAHS Publ. no. 164. 1987. Accessed March 27, 2017.
http://hydrologie.org/redbooks/a164/iahs_164_0003.pdf.
This was one of the earliest articles I used to develop my paper; I found it online by searching simply for "Tenochtitlan" and "hydrology." It made me realize I needed to include the mythological aspect of the Aztec's relationship with water, alongside the technological aspect, to give a complete picture. It's not terribly thorough, but it is a well-organized overview of the Aztec's engineering accomplishments.
Wigington, Emily Elizabeth.
"Transforming the Hydraulic Landscape of the Basin of Mexico in
the Postclassic and Colonial Periods: The Case of Chapultepec," in Anthropology Graduate Theses &
Dissertations. 34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014. Accessed April 14, 2017.
http://scholar.colorado.edu/anth_gradetds/34.
This article focuses primarily on the Chapultepec site, but its introduction has a good explanation of some of the recent developments in Valley of Mexico scholarship overall. Like the Raynal-Villasenor article, it contains a subject-based exploration of Aztec hydrological projects, but I found it more thorough and its prose more evocative. Its description of the construction techniques used for the Chapultepec aqueduct is the best I found. It even has a picture! I located this, again, by searching for a combination of technical terminology and "Tenochtitlan."
Prepared by James Lentz for Honors US History I: Native Americans