Colonial Cataclysms: Climate, Landscape, and Memory in Mexico’s Little Ice Age 9780816539963, 2019036752

Citation preview

COLONIAL CATACLYSMS

L ATIN AME RICAN LAN D S C A P ES Christopher R. Boyer and Lise Sedrez Series Editors Editorial Board Guillermo Castro Herrera José Augusto Drummond Stefania Gallini Stuart McCook John R. McNeill Shawn Miller Cynthia Radding John Soluri

COLONIAL CATACLYSMS Climate, Landscape, and Memory in Mexico’s Little Ice Age

BRAD LEY SKOP Y K

The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu

© 2020 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2020

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3996-3 (cloth) Cover design by Leigh McDonald

Cover art: The Lower Teotihuacán Valley as Depicted by Natives of Acolman (1763) [detail], courtesy of Archivo General de la Nación

Interior design and typesetting by Sara Thaxton

Typeset in 10/14 Adobe Caslon Pro, Grotesque MT Std, and Helvetica Neue LT Std Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Skopyk, Bradley, author.

Title: Colonial cataclysms : climate, landscape, and memory in Mexico’s little Ice Age / Bradley Skopyk. Other titles: Latin American landscapes.

Description: Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 2020. | Series: Latin American landscapes | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019036752 | ISBN 9780816539963 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Crops and climate—Mexico—Teotihuacán Valley—History. | Crops and climate—

Mexico—Zahuapan River Watershed—History. | Climate and civilization—Mexico—Teotihuacán Valley—History. | Climate and civilization—Mexico—Zahuapan River Watershed—History. |

Teotihuacán Valley (Mexico)—Climate—History—16th century. | Teotihuacán Valley (Mexico)— Climate—History—17th century. | Zahuapan River Watershed (Mexico)—Climate—History— 16th century. | Zahuapan River Watershed (Mexico)—Climate—History—17th century.

Classification: LCC S451.7 .S56 2020 | DDC 338.1/4097252—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036752 Printed in the United States of America

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Paula and Anastasia, for your love, in memory of Elinor Melville, my teacher, and in memory of Will Skopyk, my nephew.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1.

3

Watermarks: The Colonial Mexican Pluvial and Its Hydrographic Archive

2.

ix xiii

31

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries: Managing the Ecological Revolution in Early Colonial Tlaxcala

3.

66

A Drunken Landscape: Pulque, Mule Trains, and the New Wastelands

4.

Embedded Lives: Silt, Water, and Politics

5.

Memories of a Devious Landscape: The Commissioner’s

89 131

Report of 1761

165

Conclusion

201

Appendix A: Reconstructing Colonial Mexico’s Climate Appendix B: A Framework of Soil-Water Dynamics Notes References Index

213 246 255 281 305

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Two photos of courtyard of Ex Convento de Acolman Erosion on the slopes of upper Zahuapan River basin (near Tlaxco) A General View of the Pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacán, 1864 Map of the lake and adjacent lands between Tepexpan and Tequiciztlan, 1578 The Gudiel map (1585), showing the hydrology of San Juan Teotihuacán Castañeda’s map of the Teotihuacán Valley, produced for the Relación geográfica in 1580 Map production in the Teotihuacán Valley by quarter century Population changes in colonial Tlaxcala Abandoned land in the Tlaxcala City watershed (hectares) Mature maguey pulquero (Agave salmiana) Sloping terraces with maguey (metepantli), central Tlaxcala Sloping terraces with maguey (metepantli) on barren hill slope in central Tlaxcala Deteriorating metepantli on Tezoyotepec Hill Ratio of hectares to draught animals in rural Tlaxcala The Late Maunder Minimum crisis in Tlaxcala

6 8 37 46 52 55 56 78 79 90 108 108 109 113 124

x

|

Illustrations

16. Flood frequency in Tlaxcala City (Tlaxcala) and Acolman Dam (Teotihuacán) 17. Approximate sedimentation in the reservoir of Acolman Dam 18. Map of Juan del Campo Velarde showing townland of Tepexpan, Cuanalan, and river and dam (1727) 19. The lower Teotihuacán Valley as depicted by an Acolman priest (1762) 20. The lower Teotihuacán Valley as depicted by natives of Acolman (1763) 21. Don Joseph González de Silva’s map, 1765 22. Scale and cardinal directions of don Joseph’s map 23. Don Diego Najara y Becerra near Tecopilco and Xipetzinco 24. Peacemaking at Cuamancingo with Malintzin, Cortés, and local noblemen 25. Cortés and Malintzin await peacemaking near Texopan and Zacatelco 26. PDSI values for east-central Mexico, 1500–1850 (i.e., the Correlation Area) 27. Long-term precipitation trends in the Valley of Mexico 28. Annual rainfall from 1400 to 1850 CE reconstructed from Juxtlahuacan speleothem and calibrated for the Valley of Mexico 29. Scatter charts of Tlaxcalan annals 30. Variability of the Agroecological Index, 1540–1809 31. Comparison of Agroecological Index and Mexican Drought Atlas data, using the polarity of the Mexican Drought Atlas data 32. Agroecological Index cold variability, 1540–1809 33. Reported anomalies of cold and precipitation in the Agroecological Index, 1540–1809 34. Diagram of a typical “raised barranca,” or elevated streambed

136 144 153 156 157 181 183 186 187 188 223 230 231 235 239 241 243 244 251

TA B L E S 1. 2. 3. 4.

Population estimates of Tlaxcala and the city of Puebla Area cultivated with maguey Historical output of natural springs in San Juan Teotihuacán Founders of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates

103 104 145 193

Illustrations

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Comparing versions of the origins of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates PDSI extremes in Correlation Area Six extreme decades Summary of the Agroecological Index class counts Eight Agroecological Index anomalies

|

xi

194 224 228 233 242

MAPS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Location of study region Location of Correlation Area within the central Mexican settlement zone Temperate climates of the Correlation Area Geographic range of Agave salmiana Mexico’s pulque marketing region Reports of excessive humidity, 1545–1620 Regional hydrology of the study region Hydrology of the Teotihuacán Valley Hydrology of San Juan Teotihuacán, circa 1585 Hydrology of the Acolman Dam, circa 1800 Location of the Temascal, or “El Sifón” Hydrology of Tlaxcala Topography of Tlaxcala City on a floodplain on the Zahuapan River Wetlands in the Atlancatepec region in the Zahuapan River basin of Tlaxcala, ca. 1580 Pulque markets and their regional supply zones in Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán Towns and disputed teccalli parcels near Atlihuetzyan Disputed land (altepetlalli or ejido), circa 1703, Tlaxcala Map of San Juan Teotihuacán (1865) San Juan Teotihuacán chinampas Sites of Villavicencio’s circumambulation, 1761 Candidate tree-ring series Correlation of Montezuma bald cypress chronology in central Mexico

23 24 25 26 26 27 35 36 39 41 42 68 69 72 101 118 132 144 159 166 220 221

xi i

|

Illustrations

23. Eleven PDSI extremes during the Spanish imperium 24. Speleothem locations in central Mexico 25. Mean Pearson correlation coefficients of Juxtlahuacan speleothem and the Mexican Drought Atlas reconstructed PDSI, 1540–1809 26. Mean Pearson correlation coefficients of Agroecological Index

224 229 232 240

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

his book started out as a dissertation at York University exploring the history of Tlaxcala and was then extended by postdoctoral research at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), exploring the history of Teotihuacán. Since 2014, I have used my position as assistant professor in the Department of History at Binghamton University (State University of New York) to merge the two research programs into a single narrative. The book has thus come a long way. The moves from Toronto, Mexico City, and then to Binghamton brought me within the orbit of some truly wonderful persons who have supported my work and influenced my thinking on a number of key issues. At York University, Elinor Melville and Richard Hoffmann got me excited about the environmental history of the pre-fossil fuel age whose social ecology is vastly different from our own. I am so thankful for Elinor and Richard for showing me this world before our own and for teaching me how the ecological rigors of the everyday shape the larger world of economy, politics, and culture, and vice versa. I also want to thank Anne Rubenstein, my teacher and mentor at York University, who with great generosity gave me the professional and scholarly support that I needed to get through and beyond the PhD program, especially after Elinor’s untimely passing. But even more, her leadership within the Latin American History Research Group in Toronto has been formative in fostering models of inquiry and critique and in shaping, directly, some of the chapters of this book. Many more in that wonderful research group should be mentioned—especially Gillian McGillivray, James Cypher, Dot Tuer, and Alan

xi v

|

Acknowledgments

Durston. I must apologize for leaving others unnamed. Thank you for your friendship and contagious enthusiasm for finding meaning and truth in the past. While researching the dissertation, I began studying the indigenous language of Nahuatl. The Department of History at York University, York International, and Yale University supported summer language training under the tutelage of Jonathan Amith in San Agustín Oapan, Guerrero, Mexico. Jonathan’s brilliant teaching methods and unforgiving work schedule, and my host Agustina’s patience and friendship, made this a productive and unforgettable experience. Afterward, Jonathan continued to work with me through Skype. Additionally, Camilla Townsend took a week out of her vacation to train me to read and translate wills and annals. I cannot thank them enough for their support and teachings. Three weeks after defending the dissertation, I flew south to meet with new colleagues in Mexico City, where I started a postdoc within an interdisciplinary project exploring environmental change in the Teotihuacán Valley, mainly until the end of the classical era (ca. 650 CE) but with some additional research on colonialera processes. The project was headed by Emily McClung de Tapia, who directs the paleoethnobotany lab at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The scholars in the group spanned the disciplines of geology, biology, geography, archaeology, and history. Emily invited me to participate in the project, shared her deep expertise on the past and present landscapes of Teotihuacán, gave me access to all of the institute’s resources, and let me take over her office for two years. María Castañeda de la Paz and Diana Martínez Yrizar studied historical processes in the valley and shared with me their insights and findings. Diana worked closely with me on the history of the Acolman Dam, and, together, we coauthored a chapter on the subject. Emilio Morales (a palynologist) and Cristina Adriano Morán (a doctoral researcher in archaeology) are core members of Emily’s team and took time to explain their research to me. Gerardo Jiménez Delgado, archaeologist and cartographer in the IIA, provided countless hours of instruction on ArcGIS software and cartography in general, while also building a digital elevation model of the Teotihuacán village, which was very helpful in reconstructing past hydrology. I thank all of these scholars at the IIA for their willingness (and patience) to teach me about their findings and unique methods to understand the history of Teotihuacán’s landscape and, especially, for their generous friendship and genuine kindness. The seemingly impossible task of bringing together two vast archival projects on the history of climate, landscape, and memory started in 2013 and picked up

Acknowledgments

|

xv

speed at Binghamton University. A Dean’s Research Semester offered generous support that funded subsequent research trips to Mexico to tie up loose ends. A teaching release from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, also at Binghamton University, gave me additional time to write. My colleagues at Binghamton have been enormously supportive and welcoming. Special thanks goes out to Nancy Appelbaum for her unfailing support. I am indebted to many for their help in getting this book through the publication process. The comments on the manuscript by Chris Boyer and two anonymous readers have made the book much stronger. Not only did Chris read the earliest draft of the manuscript along with some revised parts, he made a case for this book within the Latin American Landscapes book series. I thank Kristen Buckles, editor-in-chief at the University of Arizona Press, for her enthusiastic support of the book, for advocating on my behalf, and for keeping this all on schedule. Others have taken on the more daunting task of editing text and images. I am very thankful to Elbio Grosso—who is always too nice to say “no” to my unreasonable requests for assistance—for copyediting a second draft of this book manuscript with great care, skill, and speed. Similarly, John Mulvihill—the copyeditor for the University of Arizona Press—has approached the text with care and consideration, battling through my crossdisciplinary adventures with aplomb and always improving the text. Funding for the research and writing of this book has come from (in chronological order) York University, a Mexican Government Research Award, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Yale University, the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Mexico), and Binghamton University. I thank those agencies and institutions for their support. The time for writing and researching must be subtracted from what matters most in life: family. Thus, I thank my wife, Paula, and my daughter, Anastasia, for letting me miss walks in Chapultepec, visits to museums, and so many excursions within their busy sightseeing itinerary. But mostly, I thank them for their love and companionship, and the walks and other adventures that we did have. Their love sustains anything and makes everything more meaningful. To my family back in Saskatchewan, thank you for always being there for one another, especially when I was not. To my brother, Rod, for showing me what true courage is. And to the memory of Will, my nephew, who at just seventeen years old was inspired by, and found meaning in, a fire that occurred nearly five hundred years ago, in a city an ocean away. I wish we had had the opportunity to talk about that, and about so much more. Resurgam.

COLONIAL CATACLYSMS

Introduction

T

his book chases soil and water across central Mexico, from the early decades of the sixteenth century until the last years of the Spanish Empire. It finds a world in hyperactive flux, where not only society and politics had been turned inside out, but where earth and water moved chaotically and cataclysmically in an unprecedented manner. The pursuit traverses the establishment of two types of cataclysmic landscapes, one with growing marshes, brimming rivers, and new springs, and the other with quagmires, desiccated wetlands, eroded hillsides, and deep sedimentation that buried bridges and buildings. As seen from the bulrushes at the edge of swollen wetlands or knee-deep in muck left by the abrupt deposition of up to four meters of sediment, the cataclysmic floods transformed not only environments but entire ways of life. These two environmental extremes of Mexico’s landscapes—the lush waterscape or the ruined, desiccated landscape—are the most recognizable faces of the Mexican environment. For some onlookers, then and now, the first has been the object of much longing and the second a reminder of colonialism’s failures. By the middle of the eighteenth century, observers struggled to explain the environmental transformation. Some blamed Old World crops and animals or the early colonial depopulation of indigenous peoples, while others pointed fingers at Spain’s careless management of New World resources, particularly forests and wetlands. Historians have been too eager to graft these anti-colonial

4

|

Introduction

narratives into their own histories of landscape and environment in colonial Mexico, where they appear as fact and adequate explanation. It is time to look more critically at colonial discourse and to establish by other means where, when, and why this transformation came about. This book contends, on the one hand, that each of the two cataclysms had a very different origin from what is commonly assumed. The first was no more “natural” or “unnatural” than the second, although it did lack the physical permanence of the subsequent event. The first cataclysm was an extreme, although ephemeral, manifestation of one of the strongest climate events of the last thousand—perhaps ten thousand—years. The second moved earth and water in unexpected ways, leaving behind a geomorphic legacy that could not be ignored, not then and not now. A second contention is that each cataclysm—having been forged during a critical conjuncture of truly unprecedented proportions, a crucible of human and natural forces—unhinged the customary ways in which humans organized, thought about, and made a living from the environment of central Mexico. Each wrought profound changes on colonial Mexican society, altering land use and distribution, rural social relations, and even how locals and elite alike characterized Mexico’s “innate” fertility—or infertility.

The Geomorphic Cataclysm Let us look a little more closely at the second of those cataclysms, an extraordinary transformation of the Mexican countryside, in a matter of decades, from an idyllic palustrine environment to a landscape with barren hillsides and overburdened valleys, where floods occurred with intensities and frequencies never before seen. In multiple watersheds in central Mexico, topsoil and underlying sediment eroded at astounding rates from the 1690s onward, with complementary sedimentation along the colluvial footslopes, in floodplains, and farther downstream in valleys. The first signs of crisis had emerged by 1730, but not until midcentury did the accretions of alluvium (fluvially deposited sediment, sorted along the reach of the river from fine to coarse materials), reaching two to three meters in depth, garner frequent remark. By the last decades of the Spanish imperium, depths of four meters were not uncommon. The alluvium accumulated so rapidly that even middle-aged onlookers, who could compare reference points a mere two or three decades apart, observed the changes firsthand. They were astonished by what they saw.

Introduction

|

5

The sediment obstructed river channels, in-filled wetlands, and caused general chaos in the hydrological network, leading to the emergence of a new flood regime. Floods increased in frequency, reaching a climax in the 1770s of once in five years. Roads were washed away, inns abandoned, great colonial churches and convents savagely flooded, their patio cemeteries “naturally” excavated by the floodwaters, leaving bodies and church relics floating downstream. Silt mounded around the foundations of the buildings, such as the Ex Convento de Acolman, about forty kilometers northeast of the main square (Zócalo) of Mexico City. By the late eighteenth century, the convent was abandoned altogether when the ground-level doors could no longer be accessed, submerged by meters of dirt. Later, in the early twentieth century, at the end of the Mexican Revolution, archaeologists led efforts to excavate the church from the alluvium. Today, the Ex Convento has a “sunken” appearance, lying close to three meters below the surrounding (highly alluviated) terrain, as seen in figure 1. Signs posted in the building (now a museum) indicate the height of historic floodwaters, but do not offer any notice of the deep alluviation. A watershed away, in the neighboring province of Tlaxcala, a similar sequence with a similar chronology unfolded. The floods were so devastating by the 1780s that the indigenous government there juxtaposed their historic enemy—the Mexica, or Aztecs—with its current one, its “greatest enemy . . . the voluminous river that passes nearby called the Zahuapan.” A few years later, the tone became more emphatic: The very great damages [gravísimos extragos] that the impetuous floodwaters of the said Río de Zahuapan have caused and continue to cause, mainly in the

rainy season, and the complete absence of any help that the city has had in order to combat them, and as such this furious enemy prepares the total ruin of this city, if a fix is not found very quickly.1

No fix came. The same problems continued in the mid-nineteenth century and are still reported today, although now dredging machines are employed to remove the sediment. In the 1760s and 1780s, both upstream and downstream of the city, the furious enemy had buried entire bridges below deep accumulations of sand and silt, or simply washed away all signs of the bridges. The river shifted from one channel to another, all formed well above the elevation of the ground in the previous century. Vast extensions of wetland were in-filled with sediment and thereby desiccated. Today, these palustrine gems are lost even to memory.

with the surrounding terrain, which sits about 2.4 meters above it. Even with these excavations, the original base is likely about fifty centimeters lower. Churches and other important constructions were built above the surrounding ground/street level, so that access to the floor of the atrium required visitors to climb a few stairs. Photos by author, November 22, 2012.

FI GURE 1 Two photos of the courtyard of the Ex Convento de Acolman. In both pictures, the excavated courtyard is juxtaposed

Introduction

|

7

Above these valley features, hillsides were completely washed away and carved by gullies that formed in a matter of decades. Figure 2 exemplifies the effects of erosion on hillslopes in the northern Zahuapan River basin. Was the transformation of soil and water a product of extreme climate variability? With the benefit of new paleoclimatological data, it is possible to reassess the role of climate in Mexican history and to answer this question with remarkable certainty. (See appendix A for a full analysis of the climatological sources and chronologies.) State-of-the-art climate reconstructions for the region show that with the exception of two periods—1696–1705 (the most significant decadal-scale drought in the last six hundred years) and 1729–1733 (a short and only moderately dry five-year phase)—the eighteenth-century Mexican climate was exceptionally good, lacking multiyear periods of extreme weather until 1779. It was, in fact, the most salubrious climate of the colonial era and one of the best of the last six hundred years. The climate of the eighteenth century was actually celebrated by the scientist José Alzate Ramírez, who noted that “between 1771 and 1778, New Spain experienced a Golden age (abundant grain and free of disease), when the public finally enjoyed an Octavian peace [i.e., Pax Romana].”2 The climate of central Mexico between 1706 and 1778 was uncharacteristically balanced, with essentially as many wet as dry years (38 versus 35). Compared to the previous 160 years of climate history, the period in which the geomorphic cataclysm unfolded was strangely moderate. There is little doubt that landscape desiccation was underway by the 1780s, but drying should not be confused with drought. It is best characterized as a process of dehumidification spawned by a normalization of precipitation and a warming of temperatures, a withdrawal from the extreme wetness of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (discussed below). Thus, when the House of Bourbon was internationally recognized as rulers of the Spanish Empire in 1713, the imperial skies were already beginning to clear and a new age of imperialism was dawning. By contrast, the Habsburgs who ruled Castille and its global empire from 1516 until 1700 could not find respite from troubled Mexican skies until late in their dynasty, from 1662 until 1688, a period of twenty-seven years with only three extreme years (two wet and one dry). After 1778, the Bourbon monarchy finally got a taste of the Habsburg experience, climatically speaking. The era of the “Octavian peace” ended quite abruptly with two very dry years in 1779 and 1780, followed by highly variable precipitation patterns. The eruption of the Laki volcano (in Iceland) in 1783 resulted in a couple of years of damp, cool, and cloudy conditions, especially in

FIGURE 2 Erosion on the slopes of upper Zahuapan River basin (near Tlaxco). To the left, a wide vista of a deeply eroded landscape and, to the right, a close-up of eroded soil profiles with pedestals of two to three meters high. While the erosion shown in this photograph is severe, it is nevertheless quite common in both Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán. Photos by author, July 2005.

Introduction

|

9

1784—a typical weather pattern in Mexico for the immediate post-eruption years. The extreme wetness of 1784, however, was followed by the driest tandem of years in the Mexican paleoclimate record, which Alzate called the Year of Hunger, a disastrous sustenance crisis from 1785 until 1786. For the next six years, the climate continued to oscillate between extreme wet (1788) and extreme dry (1789/90) conditions—the latter associated with a strong El Niño phase—and then settled into an extended multidecadal period of sustained high humidity.3 Thus, other than the megadrought of 1696–1705, the drought of 1729–1733, along with three (admittedly closely spaced) two-year extremes in 1779/80, 1785/86, and 1789/90, climatological evidence does not support a definition of the eighteenth-century Mexican climate as drought-stricken. Variability, rather than long-term drought, best characterizes the century. Falling lake levels and decreasing stream baseflow were natural consequences of the dehumidification that followed much wetter times during the first 150 years of colonial rule. Indeed, the truly severe climate events of the late colonial era occurred after the Year of Hunger and took the form of pluvials, not drought. Between 1791 and 1818, 79 percent of years were wetter than normal. The period from 1791 to 1796 was one of the six wettest in the colonial era, although not as wet as the period from 1809 to 1817. The second wettest year on record was 1816, with the preceding and subsequent years very wet too. Such humidity was owed to another post-eruption phase that followed the Tambora (Indonesia) eruption of 1815, one of the biggest climate events of the Holocene and “the largest eruption of recorded history,” which “resulted in the greatest-known death toll attributable to a volcanic eruption.”4 It is worth emphasizing that the timing of the cataclysm did not coincide with climate-induced drought. To be clear, there is no direct causal relationship between the geomorphic cataclysms and climate. This goes against the grain of scholarly depictions of the eighteenth century that uniformly describe the century as an extended drought-induced crisis. In their assessment of the Mexican landscape and of environmental degradation, historians have relied unduly on the work of Alzate, mentioned above, who wrote in the last decades of the eighteenth century about the state of the Mexican environment, particularly with regard to issues of drought and desiccation. Alzate began recording daily weather observations in the 1770s, but quickly tired of such tedious data keeping and focused, instead, on theoretical discussions of climate change. He wrote frequently about what he saw as long-term desiccation, which he linked

10

|

Introduction

to deforestation and colonial mismanagement of Mexico’s natural resources. His drive to study and explain the apparent drought and desiccation gained momentum after he witnessed the horrors of the drought of 1785 and 1786. Thus, having experienced the end of the Octavian peace that reigned until 1778, and having observed a decade of mostly drier conditions (punctuated by the three two-year extremes of 1779/80, 1785/86, and 1789/90), Alzate was struck by the drying trend and worsening weather. He wrote on seven separate occasions between 1784 and 1791 (especially in 1790 and 1791, at the end of the mainly dry phase) about the effects of trees and deforestation on atmospheric humidity.5 Given his recent experience of dry weather—conditions that were shared across many regions of the world as a result of teleconnections between warming temperatures in the Pacific Ocean and global atmospheric systems, that is, the El Niño Southern Oscillation—he was preoccupied with the threat of drought and terrestrial desiccation, not with the dangers to agriculture and urban infrastructure posed by water-saturated soils. In doing so, Alzate brought to Mexico a new global climatological discourse that worried about growing desiccation of the Earth—particularly the tropics—because of deforestation. This discourse, which scholars have labeled “desiccation theory,” remained popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 Alzate’s influence runs throughout modern historiography, as is evidenced by the recurrent emphasis on drought in works by Charles Gibson, Enrique Florescano, Susan Swan, Arij Ouweneel, Virginia García Acosta, and Georgina Endfield.7 Gibson, for instance, treated the land-atmosphere feedback mechanism advanced by Alzate’s desiccation theory as fact.8 Florescano, one of the most important historians of colonial Mexico, and by far the most important and prolific historian to explore climate-society interactions in Mexico until the 1990s, emphasized drought above all else in Mexico, especially during the late eighteenth century.9 The same thematic (drought) and temporal (late eighteenth century) parameters were reinforced within the work of historians Swan, 10 García Acosta,11 and Ouweneel, all deeply influenced by Alzate.12 In the last twenty years, geographer Endfield has led a resurgence of research on colonial Mexican climate history, especially with regard to the central settlement zone from Oaxaca to Mexico City to Guadalajara. While this work has provided a sophisticated conceptualization of the relationship between climate and society, based on deep archival research, the climatic parameters and periodization are quite traditional, reifying the master narrative focused almost exclusively on late-colonial drought.13 Indeed, in one influential essay, Endfield (and coauthor

Introduction

|

11

Sarah O’Hara) recast the global “Little Ice Age” as Mexico’s “Little Drought Age” (my emphasis).14 In light of these erroneous depictions of eighteenth-century climate and ecology, my work seeks to reframe both the periodization of climate change in colonial Mexico and the ecological and geomorphic conditions that contributed to the turbulent times of the eighteenth century. Existing scholarship has not identified the existence of this cataclysm, much less dated its onset (ca. 1700), its first phase of significant sedimentation (ca. 1730s), its peak (ca. 1770s), or its waning (ca. 1790s). Yet these were not silent forces. As I hope to make clear, the record of this cataclysm is fully visible in the archive; it was not only a subject of much concern, but discussed, debated, and litigated over. In some cases, the flow of water was physically measured in the field and the accumulation of sediment was visually estimated by experts. The geomorphic cataclysm has been hiding in plain sight under the blazing skies projected through the work of Alzate and other desiccationists.

The Colonial Mexican Pluvial The geomorphic cataclysm was the second cataclysm in colonial Mexico. The first, by contrast, was climatic rather than geomorphic and coincided with an extreme wet/cold climate phase that dominated central Mexico, peaking in three thirty-year waves around 1550, 1580, and 1610. In many ways, it transformed Mexican society more fully than the later event. I call this climatic phase the Colonial Mexican Pluvial. The pluvial began with an extreme oscillation from drought to high humidity. From 1514 to 1539, June rainfall (a telltale month to predict yields of rainfalldependent agriculture) was consistently low, with early season drought peaking in 1524, 1528, and 1538. Normal or warmer-than-normal temperatures likely predominated. Total annual precipitation during these years dropped substantially from the millennial-scale maxima reached during the Mexica era, but the drought was not of such severity or duration to desiccate the lakes, wetlands, and rivers of central Mexico. After the Conquest-era drought, the Mexican pluvial mentioned above reasserted itself until at least the second decade of the seventeenth century, replenishing lakes, wetlands, and rivers across central Mexico. It is difficult to exaggerate the cold, damp conditions that predominated during this critical phase of Spanish imperialism. Increased volcanic

12

|

Introduction

activity, falling levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and reduced solar output left central Mexico—like so many other places in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres—with cool, cloudy, and damp conditions. The pluvial was not, however, uniformly wet and cold, geographically or temporally. Rather, conditions varied, reaching pluvial peaks circa 1545, 1552, 1577, and 1610. Cold predominated from the early 1540s to the late 1550s and again from the 1590s to the 1620s. Afterward, from the late 1620s until the early 1670s, pluvial conditions dissipated, replaced by a veritable seesaw of cold/wet with hot/dry.15 This climate chronology for central Mexico parallels the global Little Ice Age, one of the coldest phases of the last 11,500 years (i.e., since the last ice age). While some scholars have defined the Little Ice Age as occurring between roughly 1300 and 1850, recent work has refined its temporal scope to the long seventeenth century. Paleoclimatologist Raphael Neukom and colleagues have identified an extended cold phase from 1594 to 1677 (which they call the “peak Little Ice Age”) and a slightly longer, globally synchronous cold phase from 1571 to 1722. Indeed, the period from 1570 to 1715 is just one of two transhemispheric climate events in the last one thousand years (the other being the current global warming era).16 Similarly, the golden age of the eighteenth century—which Alzate called the Octavian peace—has been referred to, globally, as the Enlightenment climate optimum.17 Even the quasi-normalization of climate in the mid-seventeenth century is corroborated by the Neukom and colleagues study. The only substantial difference between central Mexican and global climate variability is the rather early and abrupt onset of Little Ice Age conditions in central Mexico during the 1540s, a couple of decades before most other Northern Hemisphere locations and three to five decades before most Southern Hemisphere locations. Otherwise, the reconstruction provided in this study matches global chronologies. The identification of a statistically significant period of climate change does not preclude significant and crisisinducing climate variability before or after the Little Ice Age. Yet it suggests that such conditions were more frequent and more severe during this period. It also denotes a period of statistically significant global cooling at the century scale, a cooling phase not found in any other period of the last two thousand years.18 During the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, soils saturated, springs burst forth everywhere, lakes and wetlands reached maxima, and river channels could no longer contain the copious waters, leaving land, towns, and cities devastated. The great floods that ravaged Mexico City during this era are directly and mostly attributable to the pluvial. Across central Mexico, floods—in completely

Introduction

|

13

separate watersheds from that of Mexico City and without the extensive marshes that were so unique to the viceregal city—challenged the sustainability of urban and rural societies, simultaneously and quite uniformly. Extreme cold, however, was the most crucial aspect of this crisis. Not only did it lower rates of evapotranspiration and thereby increase wetness, but it resulted in frequent frosts that destroyed crops and occasional winter snowfall events that toppled vegetation and killed off livestock. The abrupt shift to a cold, water-saturated landscape changed the ecology of fauna and flora in ways that—admittedly—can only be partially reconstructed in this book. This much is known, however: the pulses of the pluvial caused wild swings in the population dynamics of many invertebrate, fungal, and mammal species. In some cases, these cycles caused great harm to crops and thereby combined with frost and snow to threaten the viability of land use and food production systems. Additionally, the climatic and corresponding faunal oscillations generated epidemics among humans and epizootics among livestock, decimating these populations. By the end of the pluvial, Mexican society had reached its demographic nadir. It rebounded in improved climates of the later seventeenth century (the era of Habsburg respite, mentioned above), was struck down again with a final cold period in the 1690s (with an oscillation from very wet to very dry), and then grew rapidly in the eighteenth century under warmer and less humid skies.

Ecological Mestizaje The narrative thus far, of climatic and geomorphic agency in two colonial cataclysms, threatens to give the impression that this book treats climate and geomorphology as strictly “natural” forces, untouched by human influence. The implication would be that humans were somehow on the receiving end of capricious nature, innocent bystanders in a world beyond their control. It is time to correct this view and discredit the dualistic paradigm of human/nature, which fails to capture the complexity of human ecology, the incessant interplay between and interdependency of the sociocultural practices of humans and the biophysical world they inhabit. All of the so-called natural agents explored in this work—with the partial exception of climate—were profoundly shaped by human activity. Pathogens that invaded human bodies had (and have) a long coevolutionary history with humans, with the spaces and niche ecologies humans create, with the companion species of our societies, or even with the

14

|

Introduction

weeds and pests that, themselves, form part of ecosystems that give us sustenance, warmth, and shelter. Similarly, the ecological contexts of many diseases shift with changes to land use or climate. Indeed, the interdependency of disease and climate has been discussed in relation to the emergence of many epidemics, such as plague, yellow fever, malaria, and also the great Mexican “cocoliztli” epidemics of the sixteenth century. This latter case is discussed in chapter 1.19 The domestication of plants and animals is also a coevolutionary process, managed but not conquered by humans. As Edmund Russell has made clear, this coevolution continues to this day.20 Similarly, the flows of energy and matter that move through carefully planned agricultural systems ensnare societies—at the most basic and essential level—within a complex ecological web that humans can only partially control. Even the most complex economic systems of capitalism do not somehow lie outside of “nature.” As sociologist Jason Moore has argued, capitalism—like all economic systems—is both a way of organizing the natural world and a part of the natural world itself. There is no way out of the “double internality,” as he calls it.21 Some have argued that even in the preindustrial world, humans have shaped the global climate, contributing to global warming and global cooling long before fossil fuels were used in any substantial way. Climatologist William Ruddiman, for instance, argues that anthropogenic forces gave shape to the Little Ice Age when depopulation in the New World—particularly in the Neotropics—initiated a phase of forest regrowth, terrestrial sequestering of atmospheric carbon, and thus cooling. That the Little Ice Age was driven mostly by non-anthropogenic forces (volcanic eruptions, lessening irradiation, and orbital anomalies) does not negate the human hand in the climatic downturn of the sixteenth century.22 Within this messy back-and-forth between humans and the nonhuman world, across space and time at various scales, this book avoids the pointless search for original causes or attempts to put culpability in either human or natural domains. Recovering the interplay between the human and nonhuman provides a far richer template to understand our place in nature. How we erect and manage these socioecological systems—and the mastery of the skills and knowledge to modify them to manage challenges such as demographic growth, energy shortages, abrupt changes in the population dynamics of other species in socioecological systems, or climate-induced changes to the availability of plant and animal life—very much determines our success in limiting our vulnerability to climatic or biophysical agency. The approach taken here is to follow

Introduction

|

15

the ingenuity of the ecologies we build, but also the human and environmental consequences. Indeed, the idea of “colonial cataclysms” seeks to convey more than just the sudden changes in the natural order, particularly great floods that clearly occurred within both the climatic and geomorphic landscapes. Even though all of these connotations—sudden, transformative, environmental, and aquatic— suggest the types of events narrated in this book, “cataclysm” does not imply despair, destruction, or declension. Nor does it rule out the possibility that these “natural” revolutions materialized because of the vulnerabilities of socioecological systems that colonial Mexicans created and inhabited. Instead, I argue that the two colonial cataclysms were moments of opportunity, contestation, struggle, and even renewal, where even the historically downtrodden might come out on top.23 In navigating the new biotic agents brought by newcomers from the Old World, in assessing the economic potential of new products, and in devising agrarian systems that, by their very nature, were ensconced within on-theground ecological interactions and interdependencies (which I call “agroecologies”), local indigenous producers took a lead role in reshaping the rural Mexican landscape through creative recombinant ecologies, a process that some have termed “ecological mestizaje.”24 It has been obvious to historians for decades that depictions of local farmers and local communities as “traditional” and “conservative” cannot capture the dynamism within the indigenous world.25 While collective projects and elite indigenous projects might be the easiest to chart, individual acts recorded in archives show small-scale indigenous producers identifying market opportunities and working out ecological solutions.26 Local environmental knowledge and a profound experience with new and old biota gave them a natural advantage in agrarian innovation. European elite discourses of science (such as medicine, astrology, and cosmography in the Habsburg era or natural history in the Bourbon era) created little applied agricultural knowledge. Clearly, some disciplines such as architecture and hydrology provided approaches for solving practical problems of earth and water, but biological/ agrarian innovation was lacking in the early colonial Spanish sphere.27 During this pluvial phase, local indigenous societies across central Mexico experimented with and profited from agrarian production for new global and regional markets. Local indigenous farmers devised new ecological strategies that successfully tied together—at least for a time—local skills and emerging global climates and markets. They made small fortunes from native Mexican

16

|

Introduction

insects and worms. They supplied new mining towns during the global silver boom with newly imported Asian pigs raised in the now-abundant Mexican wetlands. They invested tremendously in Old World gristmills that harnessed the abundant waters of the pluvial. They hired Spaniards to teach shepherding and wheat production, which they then learned to master to supply woolen textiles to high-altitude mines in the Andes or carbohydrate foods consumed on transoceanic vessels. And, most significant for this book, they adapted the production of a native inebriant called pulque to a new agroecology and marketing system. Pulque production centered on a native Mexican plant (a drought- and frost-tolerant succulent) within a community of plants and animals, mainly from the Old World. By century’s end, central Mexico was thoroughly dominated by the new pulque agroecology. Successfully determining appropriate and profitable land-use practices required careful adaptation to rapidly emerging economic markets, and to the shifting terrain of soil, water, climate, and sociopolitical dynamics. The four meters of alluvium that accumulated in the eighteenth century caused significant social repercussions for those who lived or farmed in the valley lands where these sediments accumulated. Thus, the radical shifts in climate, hydrology, and geomorphology played critical roles in the deployment of biota and the evolution of agroecological systems throughout the course of the Spanish imperial era. Farmers were drawn into prolonged conflicts with their neighbors: wetlands alluviated, opening up new lands for cultivation; flooding rendered some lands unfit for cultivation; desiccated wetlands terminated aquatic land uses, such as the harvesting of reeds and fish, while wetland growth could foster such uses or end others; decreasing water resources led to disputes; stream avulsion caused chaos in property lines; and so on. Local indigenous persons and communities— the groups mainly, but not exclusively, addressed in the pages of this book—did not shy away from conflict, but picked legal battles they thought they could win. Even when court decisions favored their opponents, they could not be considered passive victims. Upstream, on the hillsides from which soil was entrained and carried away, other problems arose: some parcels became too eroded to cultivate; roads were washed away or cut through by newly formed gullies; land use shifted to accommodate the scant soils that remained; and crucial landmarks that determined property lines disappeared. In sum, the changing flows of water and silt caused problems for some and opened opportunities for others—that is, environmental dynamism had its human counterpart. Environmental and climatic crises did not bring on lethargic resignation to the capriciousness of

Introduction

|

17

nature. Rather, the population got busy and creative, responding to new market opportunities, and assembling critical biological and engineering knowledge that enabled environmental projects to succeed. This argument adds to the scholarship that complicates the narrative of the encounter of Old and New World ecologies. Who controlled the process; who won; who lost; and what were the environmental costs? The starting point to answer such questions is clearly the now classic work of Alfred Crosby. In a series of essays and books starting in the late 1960s and culminating in 1986 with Ecological Imperialism, Crosby explored the impact of Old World biology on New World environments, arguing that Europeans succeeded in the New World not simply because of their technological superiority, but because their companion species (germs, seeds, and animals) prospered in the new land. 28 While Crosby had little to say about the interactions of power and biology in Mexico, historian Elinor Melville adapted Crosby’s thesis to the central highlands of Mexico by studying the environmental impact of the introduction of Old World sheep in the Mezquital Valley, located immediately to the north of Mexico City.29 According to Melville, sheep—and deforestation because of fuelwood demand—reduced biomass and biological diversity, producing a barren landscape best suited to European livestock and favoring Spanish industries and, thus, Spanish economic and political power. In the wake of Melville’s momentous study, others added to the historiography of post-conquest biological dynamism, offering different interpretations of the impacts of transoceanic biological diffusions.30 The argument that the diffusion of Old World agrosystems in Mexico caused extraordinary ecological destruction has a very long history. Early versions of the argument emerged with the work of Lesley Byrd Simpson (1952) and Charles Gibson (1964), both of whom made significant use of descriptions in early seventeenth-century comments by royal cosmographer Enrico Martínez (1606) and friar Juan de Torquemada (1615), the latter reiterating the argument of Martínez and giving it wider dissemination. Both figures established a causal link between flooding and erosion, and between erosion and the spread of Old World agriculture. Similar to the anti-colonial position held by Alzate, the anthropogenic arguments of Martínez and Torquemada spoke to preexisting social issues and debates. For Martínez, the anthropogenic argument allowed him to counter competing theories that emphasized a climatic pluvial (a debate engaged in chap. 1). In the case of Torquemada, a Franciscan friar, the anthropogenic argument functioned in two ways. On the one hand, it placed

18

|

Introduction

moral culpability on the actions of supposedly immoral Spanish cultivators who threatened the well-being of the indigenous population. On the other, it allowed him to avoid portraying the floods as God’s will, as punishment—perhaps—for a relapse of indigenous idolatry. If such a relapse had occurred, the spiritual work of Torquemada and other friars would be deemed a failure. The argument of Martínez and Torquemada was subsequently picked up by Simpson and Gibson, and then Crosby, Jack Licate, Melville, and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. A recent article by Tim Beach, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, and Nicholas Dunning has kept alive the argument that Old World shepherding practices caused extreme soil degradation.31 In this last essay and those cited earlier, no additional evidence beyond that of Martínez and Torquemada was ever brought to the table. A slightly more nuanced view is provided by Ángel Palerm and, much later, by Vera Candiani, who favor a two-pronged approach to explain flooding: livestock-induced erosion and poor management of hydraulic infrastructure.32 Yet again, the argument in favor of livestock-induced sedimentation relies entirely on Martínez and Torquemada. There have been some dissenting voices. Sherburne Cook (1949) identified the origins of erosion in pre-Columbian times. Others have emphasized colonial watershed stability, highlighting benign consequences of Old World biota.33 Arguments in favor of stability have added new types of evidence. Karl Butzer, for instance, identified relic landscape features, such as long-living trees in riverine environments (which suggested fluvial stability) or remnants of Old World livestock technology (which suggested sustainable agricultural practices). Geographer Andrew Sluyter used ecological theory to suggest that Old World livestock actually expanded arboreal vegetation by dispersing seedpods and by reducing burning that had, in the pre-Columbian era, suppressed forest regrowth. While the doubters seem to have won the day (the only English-language textbook on the environmental history of colonial Latin America emphasizes less conflict and fewer dire outcomes of the Columbian Exchange34), both the pluvial and the geomorphic crisis have remained unidentified in scholarship. From Martínez to Torquemada to Alzate and beyond to modern historiography, the ethical considerations of the Spanish conquest have certainly skewed the conversation, producing either an image of a ruined landscape originating in the sixteenth century or denial of the existence of any pluvial or geomorphic cataclysm at all. Neither line of argumentation gave much, if any, agency to climate. Neither saw the Mexican landscape as anything but either in decline or stable, negating the possibility of nonlinear environmental change.

Introduction

|

19

A second wave of scholarship has added another layer of complexity to the discussion, showing that the story of the Columbian Exchange can no longer be told Eurocentrically and teleologically to explain European domination. Recent trends have emphasized the role of Africans and African biotic agents, particularly in the tropical circum-Caribbean. Judith Carney has pushed the boundaries of the conversation, showing how enslaved, marooned, and free Africans reproduced and adapted African plants in the New World, giving agency to those who seemed to have none.35 Andrew Sluyter has done much the same thing for African cattle-herding practices, though also clarifying the sites and processes of transcultural exchange and adaptation.36 John McNeill has shown that Africans and African ecology were so crucial to the development of the sugar industry in the Caribbean that, once established, the ecology of sugar discriminated against outsiders who lacked immunity to the diseases that had found their niche within the Neotropics. Nowhere was this more evident than during the wars of independence when armed newcomers died mostly from the violence of yellow fever and other mosquito-borne illnesses.37 James McCann has argued that Africa did not just export its biology, but that it, too, was an active and creative site of agrarian adaptation, combining African and New World species in innovative ways.38 Lacking in these discussions has been the role of New World agrosystems and native farmers, who were far more innovative and market oriented than previously thought. Contrary to popular belief, native species—used in new agroecological systems and for new colonial markets—also harbored great potential to transform the ecology of New Spain. Thus, this book seeks to further complicate the conversation by showing how local native communities in central Mexico acted as the primary sites of ecological creativity, assembling knowledge and skills for cultivating native and exotic plants and animals to form new, and successful, agrosystems that defy the binary of native and non-native. Furthermore, the story told extends the temporal parameters of biological exchange. Acts of biological and ecological innovation did not cease after the first decades of Spanish conquest, but continued to the last years of the colonial era, and certainly beyond. This longue-durée approach merges the original Columbian Exchange with the neo-Columbian Exchange reconstituted by the new ecologies of nineteenth-century industrialization.39 The Columbian Exchange was not a tidal wave of biological change set off by the arrival of Christopher Columbus, but a persistent ebb and flow of ecological creativity that favored those who possessed grounded ecological knowledge.

20

|

Introduction

The Ecological Rift Indigenous ecological mestizaje could produce unwanted and edaphically violent outcomes, most extraordinarily exemplified by the unprecedented rates of soil degradation and sedimentation set off by the imperfect agroecologies during the terminal Little Ice Age. I argue that the origin of the eighteenthcentury cataclysm and the ecological rift that separated it from the seventeenthcentury precursors was a new agrarian regime based on the cultivation of agave (maguey) plants in monocropped sloping terraces for the extraction of pulque (a beerlike beverage). As a shorthand, I call this agroecology the “metepantli system,” which came to dominate land use across central Mexico by the late seventeenth century. The metepantli system emerged in the first three decades of the century in the wake of extreme cold, saturated soils, and recurrent famines, epidemics, epizootics, floods, and a fiscal crisis. Carried out on friable hillside soils by a large, market-oriented, and disease-susceptible population, native land use strongly determined the geomorphic outcome. By following water and soil through time and across space, this book shows that the origin of the eighteenth-century troubles were set off by the “failure” of the metepantli system during the greatest multidecadal climate extreme of the last six hundred years, beginning in the early 1690s (and perhaps before) during a final cold and wet anomaly before emerging as the drought of the millennium, between 1696 and 1705.40 Important droughts would recur in the eighteenth century—notably during the crisis of 1785–86—but none matched the relentless severity of 1696 to 1705, which occurred within a global climatic event of unparalleled decadal-scale severity, the so-called Late Maunder Minimum (roughly 1675 to 1715).41 The metepantli system experienced widespread abandonment during the Late Maunder Minimum in large part because of the unfortunate conjuncture of biological, climatic, and political chaos. During the 1690s, the human population suffered its greatest setback since the 1570s; the population of draught animals (oxen and mules) plummeted for the first time during the colonial era; famine-induced rebellions led to government-issued orders to restrict the sale and transport of pulque to urban markets, resulting in a drastic contraction of pulque production and thereby driving field abandonment in the untested metepantli system. Rapid degradation, sedimentation, desiccation, flooding, and social-agrarian turmoil ensued for decades and even centuries afterward. While I have focused on the degrading effects of the metepantli agrosystem under

Introduction

|

21

adverse climatic conditions, other agrarian processes may have contributed to the initiation of the cataclysmic landscape. For instance, it is almost certain that the epizootic of the late 1690s and early 1700s resulted, directly, from the lack of water and grasses at that time. Before the epizootic set in, livestock overgrazed the withered pastures and exposed soils to fluvial forces.

Memory and the Paper Landscape Finally, I offer another line of argumentation, one that goes beyond the strictly socioecological narratives outlined above. It weaves through this ecological warp a colorful weft of memory, cognition, and knowledge of the natural world. I argue that each biophysical cataclysm produced a parallel set of beliefs, memories, and documents reflecting how people thought, and would think, about the central Mexican landscape. The environmental extremes of the two cataclysmic landscapes explored in this book (one characterized by extreme humidity and the other by geomorphic dynamism) were systematically and preferentially recorded in textual and graphic form. The impetus to record and remember followed the logic of a number of distinct genres and historical processes. Flooded and alluviated lands were surveyed; property boundaries were walked when disputes erupted; and regional boosters highlighted ample wetlands. At times, the production of the archive of cataclysms was coincidental: the maps and texts of the Relaciones geográficas and the land transactions documenting the Spanish acquisition of land after the demographic collapse of the indigenous population both occurred, by chance (mostly), at the height of the pluvial.42 But just as often, environmental change provided the impetus to write, paint, and talk about landscape. Regardless of how the archives formed, I argue that this memory of landscape is, and was, biased toward the recording of environmental extremes, projecting a landscape burdened by an overabundance of water or a scarcity of water. Cataclysmic landscapes were thus indelibly wrought in memory, in the archives and in living social memory. In fact, the latter often drew from—and still draws from, as is the case with the present book—this archival record, allowing the recorded past to inform subsequent depictions. The transformation of the landscape played havoc with oral memories and paper archives of landscape that were critical to property management and identity formation. Circumambulating properties and painting and describing landscape are powerful

22

|

Introduction

legal acts that have important cultural significance, especially in a world in which claims to property were contingent on anecdotal, circumstantial, and documental evidence. When the objects of the past could no longer be located in the present—that is, when past and present landscapes differed remarkably and inexplicably—problems arose that threatened the status quo and opened spaces for rethinking both the past and the present. Environmental transformation, then, had important interpretive consequences that could overturn legal, economic, and cultural norms. Indeed, because social acts of remembrance drew from the earliest colonial record, and because the vast majority of those first instances of recording date to the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, the extreme humidity of that period has become normalized as the “natural” and “original” condition of Mexico’s nature. The corollary, of course, is that the state of nonabundance or scarcity is firmly established as an aberrant and thereby unwanted condition. The fond memories of the pluvial and the specter of eighteenth-century “desiccation” thus remain alive and well in the phantasmagoria of the natural imaginary of Mexico, not only in today’s media but in current historiography. This book hopes to expose, expunge, and put in play these normative discourses.

The Study Regions The arguments and themes outlined above are developed through the examples of two separate watersheds: the Valley of Teotihuacán (a sub-basin of the Basin of Mexico, which is located in the modern State of México and, historically, was administered by magistrates in Tetzcoco, Teotihuacán, and Otumba) and the Zahuapan River basin (in the modern state of Tlaxcala and, historically, in the colonial province of Tlaxcala). The Zahuapan River basin is contiguous with the Basin of Mexico, following an arc extending from Mexico City to Teotihuacán, northeastward to Otumba, eastward to Atlancatepec, and southward to the cities of Tlaxcala and then Puebla. Map 1 shows the general context of the study region. There are good reasons to believe that the general historical patterns of climate that have been identified for Teotihuacán and Tlaxcala also apply— generally, although less rigorously—to other parts of Mexico. As is made clear by the location of the Correlation Area (the geographic area used to calculate climate variability—see appendix A for a more detailed description) at the

M A P 1 Location of study region. View “C” highlights two areas (with dashed boxes) that are the primary focal points of the study. Data are from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI).

24

|

Introduction

MAP 2 Location of Correlation Area within the central Mexican settlement zone. The

Correlation Area is a rectangle extending from N 19º to N 20º (110.7 km) and from W 98º to W 99.5º (157.9 km). In 1800, the core settlement axis extended from Oaxaca to Querétaro and then westward to Guadalajara, similar to both today and the early colonial era. Population data from Tanck de Estrada, Miranda García, and Chávez Soto, Atlas ilustrado.

heart of both the central settlement zone (map 2) and the temperate climate region that is roughly coterminous with the central settlement zone (map 3), the two study regions of Teotihuacán and Tlaxcala are highly representative of the demography and climate of a broad region in Mexico.43 The strong correlation between the central settlement zone and temperateness— with climate even replicating the arched spatial pattern of settlement from Oaxaca to Mexico City to Guadalajara—suggests common socioecological strategies across central Mexico. The same general agricultural practices extend across this contiguous area. Many of the same crops are produced throughout this region, such as maize, wheat, chilies, tomatoes, and—important to this book— the maguey pulquero (a select number of species from the Agavaceae family, which are/were grown in the temperate central settlement zone), which was one

Introduction

|

25

MAP 3 Temperate climates of the Correlation Area. Hatched lines indicate temperate cli-

mates. Climate data derived from Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO). Population data derived from Tanck de Estrada, Miranda García, and Chávez Soto, Atlas ilustrado.

of the key biological agents that drove soil erosion in Mexico (see maps 4 and 5).44 It should be noted that, while not visible on this map, the primary settlement axis continues to follow temperate climates along the western mountain range (Sierra Occidental) that follows the Pacific coast of Mexico. The only exception to the parallelism of climate and settlement is in the northeast, where few Mexicans settled until recent times despite its near-temperate climate. One of the important consequences of this symmetry between demography, climate, and subsistence strategies was that social vulnerabilities tended to be exposed simultaneously and quite uniformly across central Mexico. Epidemics in one region quickly became central Mexican pandemics; drought or frost affected harvests throughout most of the larger region, hampering relief efforts; and similarly, excessive rain and dampness affected many watersheds simultaneously, causing the swelling of rivers, wetlands, and springs across central Mexico. Take, for instance, reports of excessive and anomalous humidity between

MAP 4 Geographic range of Agave salmiana. The area is delimited by the natural habitat of the most common maguey species producing pulque. Adapted from Cervantes and Cruz, as reproduced in Ramírez Rancaño, Ignacio Torres Adelid y la industria pulquera, 8.

MAP 5 Mexico’s pulque marketing region. This map shows the sites of pulque asientos in Mexico and the contiguous zone of eighty-kilometer marketing regions surrounding each asiento.

Introduction

|

27

1545 and 1620, one of the key climatic outcomes of the early Little Ice Age in Mexico. As observed on map 6, the geographic pattern of excessive humidity follows the same arched pattern, from Oaxaca to Mexico City and westward to Michoacán, and also near the important coastal settlements of Puerto Vallarta, Vera Cruz, and Acapulco. Even though little research has been conducted in these regions on climate and society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this geographic pattern suggests that the results of this book (specifically, the identification and timing of climatic, hydrological, and geomorphological events) will have broad application in the core regions of Mexico. Methodologically, this book employs a wide variety of tools deriving from disparate disciplines such as agroecology, archaeology, climatology, geomorphology, historical GIS (geographic information science), hydrology, as well as cultural and social history. I use primary sources written in both Spanish and Nahuatl from the sixteenth century onward. While some of these disciplines and methods are common to readers of colonial Mexican history, others (particularly climatology, hydrology, and geomorphology) will seem foreign and overly technical. I have thus relegated much of the discussion of climate and physical geography to the two appendices. The maps derived from my GIS database, on the other hand, have found their way into the five main chapters of this book,

M A P 6 Reports of excessive humidity, 1545–1620. Data derived from García Acosta, Desastres agrícolas en México.

28

|

Introduction

except for many of the cartographic visualizations of climate extremes, which are found in appendix A. GIS has been an important tool to record, process, and analyze hydrological, geomorphological, and climatological data, and to integrate this with social, agrarian, and economic processes. Not only has GIS software been used to produce the maps of this book, it has also been instrumental in keeping track of where things are, where they move to, and to determine and correlate between the geographic distributions of things or phenomena.

Chapter Summaries This book is organized into five chapters, with a chronological presentation. Chapter 1 looks at the Colonial Mexican Pluvial and reconstructs the impressive hydrographic archive of this period. Maps, litigation, flood reports, geographic reconnaissance, and scientific inquiries produce an image of central Mexico as waterlogged: swollen rivers and wetlands, high spring volume, and a number of floods driven by climatic forces. Through this archive, the early colonial hydrology of the two basins is reconstructed, and in doing so we find individuals and towns struggling to adapt, to fix place in a hyperactive landscape, and to do so in a legal and administrative setting that was being invented on the fly. The anomalous nature of this hydrological situation has never been identified in historiography, much less in subsequent colonial administration and litigation. As the extreme humidity of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial receded, the hydrographic archive of the aqueous world of early colonial Mexico remained, stowed away in community chests, viceregal archives, and in private collections. This voluminous record of the pluvial would, in the late colonial era— and even today—cause many difficulties for litigants, administrators, and nation builders. Chapter 2 uses an agroecological lens to take a second look at the Colonial Mexican Pluvial. The chapter shows agroecological adaptations to the pluvial, mainly in Tlaxcala. I examine (and reject) the theory of ecological imperialism resulting from Old World diseases and livestock, and then focus on the rise of the cochineal industry in Tlaxcala and its dramatic effect on landscape management. Between 1540 and 1580, the rise of cochineal and collapse of indigenous human populations led to widespread abandonment of land and the regrowth of wild vegetation. At the height of its ascendency and wealth, the cochineal industry in Tlaxcala was brought down by Little Ice Age cold,

Introduction

|

29

forcing production to warmer climes. Despite the radical turbulence of agroecology during the first one hundred years of colonial rule, accelerated soil erosion and deposition never occurred. Instead, the combined ecological shock of colonialism and climate was successfully mediated by early colonial indigenous agrosystems, resulting in transformation without lasting degradation. Chapter 3 continues the story of indigenous field systems during the Little Ice Age, now focusing on adaptations initiated at the height of the cold pluvial, and which accelerated in the first decades of the seventeenth century, reaching their zenith after the 1660s. The chapter documents the rise of the metepantli system, whose economic wealth belied its impoverished ecology. The pulque industry would grow throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite the fact that it acted as the catalyst for unprecedented mass soil movements and for the cataclysmic landscapes of the eighteenth century. The final two chapters explore the new colonial ecology that resulted from the conjuncture of climate, pulque agroecology, and the sociodemographic crisis of the 1690s. Chapter 4 is divided, roughly, into two parts. The first part provides detailed evidence of the transformation of soil and water in colonial Mexico and the birth of cataclysmic landscape. I offer analysis of flood frequencies, shrinking wetlands, degradation, and aggradation. Through a robust geomorphological and hydrological context, I argue that a drastic transformation of the watersheds occurred between 1696 and 1730. Before this disjuncture, floods were rare events driven by extraordinary precipitation and without significant geomorphic change. Afterward, cataclysms were frequent, poorly correlated to precipitation trends, and determined by anthropogenic accelerated soil erosion that transformed watersheds. Evidence from both basins demonstrates the rapid onset of deep hillside erosion and valley sedimentation after 1715. The second part of this chapter drops us into the social conflict produced by the cataclysms. Four examples—two from each basin—show the varied and often ingenious responses of locals to the changing world. Careers and livelihoods were won and lost; some communities succeeded in obtaining new land and resources, while others failed; conflicts cut across elites and commoners, Spaniards and indios; and even the fates of the faithful seemed to hang in the balance, at times. At a basic level, these examples reveal the degree to which individuals and local communities struggled to “adapt” to the new biophysical reality, using violence, litigation, sabotage, and hydraulic infrastructure to advance their interests. The term “adaptation,” however, fails to capture and order the messiness of the processes explored in these examples, giving a false

30

|

Introduction

sense of harmonious and beneficial responses to socioecological phenomena. Similarly, this chapter emphasizes that the cataclysmic landscapes of the eighteenth century—however lamentable and disruptive they might have been, and might continue to be—cannot be depicted in strictly declensionist terms. These examples—like the chinampas project of 1818—demonstrate clearly and unambiguously that when the weather turned bad, when rivers ran dry, when floods disinterred bodies from cemeteries, when alluvium piled high around buildings and critical resources, folk got busy, necks craned to the heavens, shovels hit the ground, and accusations took flight. Finally, chapter 5 takes the reader on a ten-day circumambulation of a cataclysmic landscape, walking along with a commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, in the last days of August and the first of September 1761. The commissioner traveled with reams of legal and documentary papers from the sixteenth to eighteenth century and an entourage of witnesses and litigants. As it turns out, few of the landmarks from those documents could be found in the 1761 landscape. To close the gap between the paper landscape and the biophysical one, litigants forged documents, lied, and stretched the truth; they also naïvely misplaced, confused, and misunderstood what they were looking at. The chapter thus explores what abrupt climate-induced environmental transformation meant to memory and to understandings of place and identity.

CHAPTER 1

Watermarks The Colonial Mexican Pluvial and Its Hydrographic Archive

T

his chapter provides evidence for the existence and severe social and hydrological consequences of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, a climatic event that was probably the most important wet and cold period in Mexico in the last seven hundred years. Although the Little Ice Age lasted another century after the pluvial, and some would say longer, it would never attain such deep and sustained deviation from the mean as it did from approximately 1540 to 1620. According to the growth of trees at this time, the first forty-five years were the most incessantly wet, and within this, the first two decades were the most severe. Indeed, the period from 1542 until 1554 was more extreme than any other climate anomaly of the last six hundred years, and if the same dendrochronologically derived reconstruction of climate were available for earlier times we might find the period to be even longer. That anomaly was then followed by a similar, although shorter, one in the late 1570s and another in the mid-1580s. Given that tree growth during the second half of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial was more moderate than during the first, it is tempting to conclude that conditions of everyday life might have been improving for many Mexicans starting, already, by 1590. Nevertheless, agriculture suffered more than ever in the later part of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, peaking between 1597 and 1623, mostly as a result of cold summers and unseasonal frosts that killed crops. Because such temperature extremes do not alter the growth of the tree species used by dendrochronologists in Mexico, cold—a crucial climatic variable for the

32

|

Chapter 1

agrarian societies of the central Mexican highlands—remains unregistered and unremarked upon. Yet when we combine both data sets—the arboreal and the human—we find evidence for a truly remarkable event: an unparalleled and sustained eighty-year socioecological crisis. Even though the frequency and variety of agroecological stress events worsened between roughly 1595 and 1625, almost all of the elements of full-scale socioecological disaster had appeared by the 1580s. Severe droughts, frosts, and winter flurries occurred frequently. Flooding in the 1550s and 1570s/80s was rampant. From 1545 to 1546, central Mexico suffered a disastrous epidemic, paralleled only by an outbreak of a similar, if not identical, disease in 1576. Diego Muñoz Camargo called the 1545 epidemic “the most terrifying thing that could be imagined that ruined and finished off towns and places that today [1580–85] are nothing more than forests [montes].”1 In the 1545 epidemic, mortality was likely near 50 percent across central Mexico. Between 1541 and 1562, frosts ravaged crops in nine of twenty-three years, drought in four. Rodents (probably mice) destroyed crops in 1548, an event that some have attributed to a frost- and drought-induced shortage of traditional food supplies.2 Grasshoppers (also associated with drought) decimated crops in 1556.3 When drought did not pose a problem, excessive rainfall often did. A fungal crop disease called chiyahuiztli attacked maize plant roots in 1544 and 1559, weakening the plants and permitting worms to consume the ears. Of course, the essential characteristic of this pluvial, like any other, was excessive rainfall and abnormally high soil humidity. As we saw in the introduction to this book (see map 6), reports of humidity surged across central Mexico, especially in the core basins of Mexico, Toluca, and Tlaxcala/Puebla, and somewhat less severely in western and south-central Mexico (i.e., Michoacán and Oaxaca, respectively). The pluvial culminated in transregional floods in 1629, the most famous of which was the great flood of Mexico City. There, flooding had begun in 1627, and then, during a massive regional storm in September 1629, the city fell below meters of water. The five-year flood from 1629 to 1634 nearly ruined Mexico City, prompting and inspiring plans to move the city, although funding for such an ambitious project never materialized.4 The last century-scale pluvial of this magnitude ended in the mid-fifteenth century. It, too, inspired major hydraulic projects, such as the rerouting of the Cuauhtitlan River (beginning in 1433) and the construction of the twenty-two-kilometer dike in the valley lake system (initiated in 1449), both located in the immediate vicinity of Mexico City, known then as Tenochtitlan. When humidity returned, briefly, in the

Water marks

|

33

1480s, it spurred another round of hydraulic investments, specifically the call to finish the Cuauhtitlan channel. What makes the Colonial Mexican Pluvial so much more intriguing—and more difficult to interpret—than the pre-Hispanic floods is that it coincided with Spanish imperialism. Thus, the climatic influence on floods, diseases, and agroecological crises that bedeviled the newly subjected peoples of central Mexico must be contextualized within—and perhaps disentangled from—the effects of Spanish rule. After all, the peak pluvial is undeniably coincident with the establishment of Spanish colonial legal hegemony, the essential period of transference of land and water rights from indigenes to Spaniards, the onslaught of epidemic disease, the demographic nadir of the indigenous population, and, generally, the impoverishment of central Mexican indigenous peoples. The tendency among historians has been to downplay the role of climate and ecology in driving hardship and mortality during this period. For instance, floods have been explained as the product of colonial influences such as Old World livestock, Old World disease (which decimated indigenous populations and led to soil erosion in abandoned lands), indigenous depopulation, or Spanish ignorance of New World ecologies and indigenous hydraulic infrastructure. Strangely, historians have not considered the role of climate in these floods. Even the question of indigenous depopulation—once considered unavoidable because it resulted from virgin soil epidemics in which native Mexicans lacked acquired immunity to Old World pathogens—has been fully revised in the most recent literature. Historical demographer Massimo Livi Bacci and historian Suzanne Alchón, for instance, have each in separate monographs pointed to Spanish imperialism (coercion, impoverishment, and the general disruption of traditional indigenous ways of social reproduction) as the primary cause of depopulation.5 These are important arguments backed by good research, but how much of the problem (of flooding, erosion, or depopulation, for instance) do they explain? And what part of the solution to the floods, sicknesses, famines, and other socioecological stresses resides with the dynamics of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial? In light of these critical questions, this chapter seeks to clarify the role of climate in the socioecological and hydrological chaos of central Mexico during the first century or so of colonial rule. The deep hydrographic archive of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, along with complementary paleoclimatological sources, will serve us well in reconstructing the ebbs and flows of water during this critical period in Mexican history. I argue that climate played a decisive role in

34

|

Chapter 1

driving flooding, famine, and mortality. Not only does the socioecological stress caused by this first surge of the Little Ice Age provide clear and substantive evidence to explain the slow and often absent demographic bounce back after major epidemics, but it also suggests that some of the epidemics might not have occurred at all without climate-induced ecological turmoil. Most importantly, the chapter argues that even in the context of sickness and death, the pluvial fueled a creative and productive response by local communities as they sought to protect resources and find ways to profit from the changing ecology. Finally, the chapter addresses the question of memory, archive, and interpretation. It explores how colonial officials understood and experienced the pluvial, how they rationalized it, and how they connected not only sky and land, but also heaven and earth, sin and soil, and body and environment. By chance, the pluvial coincided with the critical post-conquest phase of early colonization, empire building, geographic reconnaissance, and new patterns of colonial resource utilization and land tenure. Forces such as water-induced social crises, imperial information gathering, and the codification of property in Spanish law all ensured that the pluvial would be remembered, or at least documented. From high politics and science to local administrations and land-use planning, the pluvial inspired a document-generating cycle of studying, compiling, and producing knowledge and representations of the rising water. The resulting hydrographic archive of the pluvial reveals how water penetrated deep within local and viceregal politics, spurring officials, astrologists, priests, hydrologists, planners, farmers, and many more to consider the meaning and causes of rising water, as well as to devise creative solutions to it. In charting out how and why this archive emerged, I also stop to consider its legacy, as it laid the groundwork for normative historical discourses examining the “natural” hydrological condition of Mexico and, by extension, which historical persons or groups should be held responsible for the loss of Mexico’s aquatic patrimony.

The Hydrology of the Teotihuacán Valley The examples used in this chapter all derive from the endorheic Basin of Mexico and, mainly, from the Río de San Juan, an important tributary of that basin and the central river of the Teotihuacán Valley. Before discussing the historical hydrology of the valley during the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, I offer some brief notes on its physical and human geography.

Water marks

|

35

MAP 7 The regional hydrology of the study region. This map shows the watersheds of Tlaxcala City and the Acolman Dam, which are used to gauge flood frequencies. Note that the map uses modern hydrology, thus showing the artificial exits of the waters of the Valley of Mexico to the north. Today, the Teotihuacán Valley falls within the modern territorial limits of the State of México. Map 7 shows the regional hydrological context, while map 8 helps us to visualize the spatial extent and organization of the Teotihuacán Valley. In the colonial era, the political situation was more complex. Five important cabeceras (administrative head-towns of local politics in the Spanish imperial system) populated the valley. Beginning closest to the lake and working upstream, we find the towns of Tepexpan and Tequiciztlan (in the lower valley—i.e., below the dam). In the middle valley were located the cabeceras of Acolman and of Teotihuacán. Farther upstream, the cabecera of Otumba functioned as the central hub of the upper valley. The southern limits of the valley are formed by the Patlachique mountain range, with peaks roughly between 2,600 and 3,000 meters, and to the north, mainly by the broad hill known today as Cerro Gordo (also known as Hueytepetl, or Tenan), which rises to 3,057 meters. A number of smaller hills surround the valley, especially around the northern limits of the watershed, many

36

|

Chapter 1

MAP 8 The hydrology of the Teotihuacán Valley. The maps show hydrology for the Acolman Dam in the Teotihuacán Valley. The “lower” branch of the Río de San Juan (i.e., the area below the Acolman Dam) is not shown. The Acolman Dam watershed is 532 sq. km. Hydrographic lines provided by INEGI. of which are only thinly populated by pine-oak forests and frequently by areas with deeply eroded soils.6 While the valley has a climatic seasonality similar to other parts of central Mexico, it is one of the few important productive regions with a semiarid rather than semihumid climate, receiving just 500–600 millimeters of rainfall each year. At the center of the valley is Teotihuacán de Arista, a small town located about fifty kilometers northeast of Mexico City that was known in the colonial era—and colloquially today—as San Juan Teotihuacán. It is the seat of the modern municipality of Teotihuacán, and—as we have seen—functioned as a head-town and also as seat of the eponymous jurisdiction. The town lives in the shadow of its past. Less than two kilometers to the east of San Juan’s municipal administrative offices is the Teotihuacán Archaeological Site (figure 3), an enormous area covering 238 hectares and extending 2.4 kilometers from end to end. Today, the “ruins” are well preserved, some of the most famous in Mexico and all of the Americas, and were the first in Mexico to be rebuilt, cleaned, and showcased to the world “in order to present Mexico as a unified

Water marks

|

37

FIGURE 3 A General View of the Pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacán, 1864. Lithograph. The Pyramid of the Moon (left) and of the Sun (right) are shown. The image was produced for a scientific committee examining the physical and biological geography of the Teotihuacán Valley and other nearby places. In preparation for the centennial celebrations of 1910, and in order to make the site— and Mexico— seem more sublime, the chief “inspector of monuments” for the Mexican state, Leopoldo Batres, purchased all private land in the zone and removed all vestiges of domesticated vegetation (i.e., maguey and crops). Almaraz, Ballesteros G, and Comisión Cientifica de Pachuca, Memoria de los trabajos ejecutados, image located between pages 350 and 351; Bueno, “Teotihuacán,” 62– 65.

and modern nation with ancient and prestigious roots.”7 Few of the 4.1 million annual visitors to the site will ever set foot in the town, which remains visibly, and remarkably, largely untouched by this tourism giant.8 San Juan Teotihuacán remained famous and prosperous in its own right during the colonial era and into the modern period. The village was famous and economically viable because of its abundant waters, produced by hundreds of natural springs that emerged directly within the town. An assessment of the aggregate volume of the springs, carried out in 1580, indicated that they produced eight bueyes of water, with each buey equal to twenty-four surcos (i.e., 192 surcos), and each surco thought to be about equal to 6.5 liters per second (i.e., 1,248 L/s).9 Canals and fountains—now dry—still line the town’s streets. Many homes were literally built around a spring, allowing the water to rise into beautiful tile-laden fountains, offering a form of running water to the lucky residents. When the springs went dry in 1992, a fetid odor was released,

38

|

Chapter 1

causing many to permanently seal the water spouts. Even in the absence of the spring water, signs of the water-saturated landscape remain. The humid soils gave rise to a savannah of ahuehuetes, an aquatic tree with an exceptionally long life. These, too, functioned as residential infrastructure. Today, the magnificent thousand-year-old trees grow directly through the roof of some restaurants and houses. Or rather, the houses and roofs were built, cleverly, under the canopy of one or another of these magnificent trees, taking advantage of the arboreal shade they offer. At the center of the village lay the town’s marsh, a depressional wetland without any significant or normal fluvial inputs. Occasionally, some overland flow arrived from the Malinalli Hill directly to the north, and in some extraordinary years the Río de San Juan (its channel located just 230 m to the south of the wetland) spilled over its banks and deposited alluvium in the marsh. During the eighteenth century, the rapidly aggrading stream channel of the Río de San Juan initiated this process, leaving the river four meters higher than the nearby wetland and monastery. As sedimentation progressed in the marsh from the nearby river, the town’s marsh shifted palustrine classes from a depressional to a riverine wetland. Nevertheless, throughout the bulk of the colonial era, and especially during the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, it remained depressional, lacking any substantial fluvial input. As such, it remained relatively stable, undynamic, and altered only by the variability of groundwater discharge that, itself, was subject to rates of recharge upstream and long-term time lags of thirty to fifty years, as discussed above. Map 9 presents a historical reconstruction of the town’s hydrology circa 1585. Many of the elements presented in the reconstructed hydrology should be considered as approximations with regard to their location and quantity. This is especially true for the springs and ahuehuetes (Taxodium mucronatum), which were located by one of four means: a detailed map from 1585 (the Gudiel map), maps from the 1970s produced by archaeologist René Millon, a site survey of the village in 2012, and aerial photographs.10 The ahuehuetes grow near streams and wetlands and indicate the presence of a high water table. Local elevation readings and a digital elevation model derived from the Millon maps with one-meter contours also indicate low points in the terrain. While the modern locations of aquatic features are only suggestive of historical conditions, they confirm and build on the hydrology derived from historical sources: archival maps and descriptions (especially the 1585 litigation mentioned above), and an accurate map of the buildings in San Juan Teotihuacán in 1864. In this last case,

Water marks

|

39

MAP 9 Hydrology of San Juan Teotihuacán, circa 1585. the location of buildings delimited the maximum extent of the marsh. Salvage archaeological reports were also important in defining the location and extent of rivers, wetlands, roads, markets, and other cultural features. The location of the Río de San Juan derives from the scientifically digitized 1:50,000 topographical series produced by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI).11 The reconstruction should not be considered representative of hydrological conditions much before or after 1585. Indeed, the location of ahuehuetes and springs provides a sort of time mosaic of their past locations, albeit with much missing data. The spatial extent and location of the marsh and streams, on the other hand, offer a complete and somewhat proximate snapshot of very dynamic wetlands in 1585. The number of springs increased and decreased throughout the colonial era and beyond, as did their individual and collective output. The marsh, accordingly, grew and shrank with the variability of spring output and evapotranspiration/precipitation rates, as well as by means of human interventions within the local hydrology (i.e., the construction of canals, roads, buildings, and other infrastructure).

40

|

Chapter 1

Teotihuacán’s water flowed toward the Tetzcoco Lake, part of the chain of lakes within the endorheic basin of the Valley of Mexico. The complex preHispanic network of streams and wetlands in the Teotihuacán Valley became increasingly complex during the colonial era. Rivers changed names, locations, and volume frequently.12 Teotihuacán’s marshland emptied into a channel known as the Río de los Manantiales (translated literally as the River of the Springs, or in some documents as the Río Atezcalaque, a Hispanicized version of Atezcalac, a word derived from atezcatl [lake], an obvious reference to the town’s marsh). Additional spring water was added to the system at a site named El Tular, located near the town of Santiago Atla (or Atlatonco). At some points along the river’s path, its water was subdivided into as many as four main irrigation channels, with innumerable lesser branches that brought water to fields via makeshift ditches. Before the Río de San Juan emptied into Tetzcoco Lake, the waters from the springs of Teotihuacán were joined with those of the upper valley, a large catchment area upstream of San Juan Teotihuacán. While there were a number of small springs upstream that contributed to a negligible base flow, the upper Teotihuacán Valley was truly active only during the rainy season, from May/ June through September/October. In this semiarid climate, with loose volcanic soils, torrential downpours could produce significant volumes of water. Channels collected from the Patlachique range, from the flanks of the large conicalshaped Cerro Gordo, and from the range east of the towns of Otumba and Nopaltepec.13 The latter three all tracked toward the center of the valley, leaving behind deep sedimentation and a highly fractured stream network. The rivers converged immediately upstream of the classical Teotihuacán archaeological site, thereby forming the Río de San Juan. The other stream system—from the Patlachique range—delivered its flow into the Río de San Lorenzo, which then merged with the Río de San Juan immediately east of the village of Teotihuacán. The resulting river was generally referred to as the Río de San Juan, but at times—particularly in the lower valley—it might be called the Rio Grande. A critical turning point in the history of the hydrological network occurred in 1630, when the Presa de Acolman (or “Presa del Rey”) was constructed. The dam was built as a response to the great flood of 1629 at a cost of 23,500 pesos, by order of the viceroy of New Spain, Rodrigo Pacheco y Osorio, Marqués de Cerralbo (see map 10). The dam established a reservoir that was designed to hold back the waters of the Teotihuacán Valley during the rainy season. Extending 1,208 meters between two low-lying hills (the Tlahuilco and Tezoyuca hills),

Water marks

|

41

MAP 10 The hydrology of the Acolman Dam, circa 1800. the mortar and stone dam had a curtain 50–100 centimeters thick, a maximum height of about 6 meters, and thick lateral supports every few meters.14 Near the midpoint of the length of the dam, a gate allowed dam caretakers to manage water flow by inserting or removing custom-cut logs, known as trabas, that were stacked in order to lower or raise the gate. A small structure called El Castillo housed and restricted access to the gate. Hydrologically speaking, the dam’s reservoir acted as a depressional wetland with strong upland inputs, making the reservoir extremely dynamic, with substantial year-to-year variability and subject to long-term alluviation. While the idea was to drain the lake in the dry season and let it rise in the wet season, sedimentation and acts of sabotage undermined the ability of officials to control lake levels with the traba system. Sedimentation obstructed water, holes were cut in the dam, and rivers were routed around it. A second important change in the valley hydrology occurred in 1684, or a few years before this, when a branch of the Río de los Manantiales (i.e., the Acequia de San Antonio) was separated from the Río de San Juan (i.e., the

42

|

Chapter 1

MAP 11 The location of the Temascal, or “El Sifón.” The maps show the new hydrology formed by the Temascal, which separated and redirected the Río de San Juan from the Río de los Manantiales irrigation system. precipitation-fed flow from the four subdivisions of the upper basin) where the two had, historically, merged. The waters of the Acequia de San Antonio were thus tunneled underneath the channel of the Río de San Juan via a stone and mortar construction known as the Temascal, or El Sifón, and then directed toward another channel, immediately to the east (map 11). Beyond the Temascal, however, the Río de San Juan flowed within a new channel toward Santiago Atla and then southward via the extant channels once used for irrigation, located directly east of the Hacienda de San José and west of the Acolman convent. Finally, immediately before the Acolman Dam, the many channels of

Water marks

|

43

the Río de los Manantiales merged and then combined with the waters of the Río de San Juan, creating one stream that passed through El Castillo. One of the mysteries of the Temascal project is the factor, or factors, that motivated its inception. Unfortunately, the documentation lacks any open declaration about why the project was needed. Nevertheless, what is known is that the Temascal was built in the context of reports of the presence of excessive water in fields and in towns. Flooding had hit Teotihuacán, Mexico City, and Tlaxcala City in at least two separate incidents during the 1670s. Recognition of growing reserves of water spurred officials to measure the valley’s fluvial volume and to distribute it accordingly. When measurements were done in 1684—the same year that the Temascal was constructed—farmers were delighted to discover that the hydrological volume had doubled since the late sixteenth century, from sixteen to thirty-two surcos. By 1715, another sixteen surcos were added when new springs popped up in the village of Teotihuacán, bringing the early eighteenth century total to forty-eight surcos. With water supplies in abundance, the Río de San Juan must have seemed not only superfluous—it delivered water only during the peak rainy season, when already-thriving crops required no further humidity than what the skies would provide—but a risk to the perennial waters that emerged in the town of Teotihuacán. The Temascal served to protect the conduits of spring water from the storm surges of the upper basin, thereby limiting the ability of highenergy flows to alluviate canals and harm hydraulic infrastructure. Was the project precautionary or remedial? Was it dictated by the protection of growing agrarian endowments downstream (such as the powerful Hacienda de San José), or was it responding to increased costs of dredging and repairing canals, bridges, diversion mechanisms, and other hydraulic infrastructure? While documentation cannot provide definitive answers to these questions, it is certain that the project was not a response to the needs of Mexico City. The deferred merging of the two river systems and the displacement of the Río de San Juan to the center of the valley had no discernible impact on the vulnerability of the reservoir of the Acolman Dam to flooding. Yet it had important consequences for sites in the upper middle valley, such as Santiago Atlatonco, the Hacienda de San José, and perhaps the convent of Acolman, sites that now lay much closer to the channel of the Río de San Juan and now experienced the direct predations of the storm surges of the upper basin. Yet to have identified the need for the Temascal—and to have funded, designed, engineered, and executed the project—does strongly suggest that residents of the valley had

44

|

Chapter 1

identified a problem, and it is likely that this problem was incipient flooding and sedimentation. Consequently, one of the winners of the water-sharing agreement of 1684 was the community of San Miguel Xometla, in the eastern middle valley, which offered to clean the Temascal and associated canals of the San Antonio branch in return for not only water rights to irrigate town land but the chance to reroute the floodwaters of the Río de San Juan a good distance from the village.15

Harvesting the Wastelands It did not take long for the Colonial Mexican Pluvial to assert itself in the Teotihuacán Valley. Rising water manifested itself first and foremost in the valley’s wetlands, in the village of San Juan Teotihuacán, near Acolman, and where the Río de San Juan met Lake Tetzcoco, the deepest part of the lake system in the Basin of Mexico. Teotihuacán, like many other villages, picked an unfortunate time to lay the foundation of the town’s first church, the iglesia y monasterio of San Juan Teotihuacán, a Franciscan temple and monastery that would rival the Augustinian convent in Acolman. Construction in Teotihuácan began in 1548, amid the single wettest period of the colonial era that lasted from 1542 until 1554. The Teotihuacán church was built among the springs, on the south side of the wetland, and directly east of the town’s market. Canals and bathing pools were cut from the land of its patio and surrounding yards, while openings were left for fountains to appear within the church itself. Why a site with such high humidity was chosen is unclear, although its proximity to the estate of one of the most influential indigenous noble families (of don [Francisco Verdugo] Quezalmamalitzin Huetzin and his wife Ana [Cortes] Ixtlilxochitl) might have been a factor. Alternatively, and intriguingly, the site might have been selected because of its aquatic condition. A codex from the 1550s—associated with an uprising of the townsfolk who wanted the monastery to be governed by Franciscans and not the Augustinians who sought to control it, as they did downstream in San Agustín Acolman—shows a woman giving birth at the church, in a site that was either in the courtyard or in the neighboring wetland, where thrushes rose from palustrine landscape.16 Farther downstream, the pluvial caused widespread flooding in Acolman and across the Basin of Mexico in 1552 and 1553 and enlarged the extent of Lake

Water marks

|

45

Tetzcoco and others in the valley. Unfortunately, only scant comments about water conditions remain from this first phase of the pluvial. Only later, in the 1570s and 1580s, during the second pluvial peak, was climate-induced hydrological dynamism mirrored in Teotihuacán’s social realm. Litigation from the Teotihuacán Valley reveals creative interactions between towns and the rising waters in wetlands and rivers, carried out in the new legal, economic, technological, and biological context of the colonial world. In one example, Hernando de Serna, a Spaniard and resident of Mexico City, petitioned to receive a grant of land located near the shifting shoreline of Lake Tetzcoco. In 1578, the Crown accepted Serna’s petition for the grant, declaring the lands uncultivated and tierras baldías, that is, vacant or public lands, that could be redistributed to another person. The land in question lay between the towns of Tepexpan and Tequiciztlan, in the lower valley, being claimed (in the majority) by Tepexpan and (in the minority) by Tequiciztlan. The property lines and hydrological context were demonstrated in the pintura (painting) presented by the local communities (figure 4). Writing in the middle of the wet season of 1578, and at the end of the second pluvial pulse—precisely at the moment in which paleoclimatological proxies tell us that soils were saturated with water (the years of 1575, 1576, and 1577 registered PDSI values on average 1.5 standard deviations above the 1400– 2000 mean) and, as they would soon see, on the eve of floods across central Mexico in 1579 and 1580—the townsfolk of both Tepexpan and Tequiciztlan argued that cultivation of the said lands had been set aside in the past few years. Their testimony noted the shifting land-use strategy as floodwaters rose and receded. Given the unique uses that they made of the land at different flood stages, it appears that such a diversified strategy had been practiced in times before the current pluvial. The hiatus stemmed from two separate factors. First, the land was too wet. Soils were essentially saturated already in the spring and the expectation was that groundwater would eventually reach the surface during the summer months. For the last three decades, with few interruptions, soil humidity trended upward, such that the situation in the 1570s would have surprised very few in the community. The 1570s was one of three peaks between 1542 and 1630 (ca. 1552, 1577, and 1610) and was the second-most severe of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial. It was also the fourth-most severe of all events in the colonial era. But more than this, in the forty-eight years between 1542 and 1589, soil humidity was below normal in only three years, and only marginally so.

FIGURE 4 Map of the lake and adjacent lands between Tepexpan and Tequiciztlan, 1578. Archivo General de la Nación, #1272. The Tetzcoco Lake is shown at the bottom-right margin, which in the original color version is painted blue. AGN Tierras, Grant of two caballerías, fol. 7v.

Water marks

|

47

Even in the heart of the pluvial, during the dry season the townsfolk found some use for the seasonal wetland by harvesting grasses that they then burned to prepare what they called yzcahuitl (i.e., izcahuihtli, edible worms), “which come from the foam of the lake and that form into a mass when fired.”17 Tequiciztlan, the coplaintiff in the case, had long made an industry of salt collection and processing from seasonal fluctuations in the lake. Such production would have been especially robust in the previous dry era before 1542 in which intense capillary action in the clay soils near the Tetzcoco Lake lifted salts from the subsoil to the surface. Indeed, the name of the town means “place where salts abound.” According to an account from 1580, “in past times they used to make salt in the town, with which they would supply Mexico City, but in the last thirty-eight years since being in this region, [I have seen that] they have had to stop doing it [i.e., collecting salt] because of the growth of the lake that has covered the salt lands that they had harvested.”18 Thus, as the lake rose to historic elevations, the evaporated salts that had collected on the surface returned to a soluble state and could no longer be harvested. The second cause of the hiatus was a sharp demographic contraction between 1576 and 1578 that reduced the capacity of indigenous communities to use land in a manner that met a certain, hitherto unknown, criterion of sufficient land use intensity that avoided the dreaded tierras baldías designation. Livestock rearing was acceptable use; collecting nature’s fauna and flora was not. Falling below the threshold threatened claims to ownership. In 1576, New Spain was struck by an epidemic, called by contemporaries “the sickness” (cocoliztli), that reduced the local community by perhaps a third and thereby lowered demand on land. The pathogen appears to have been the same as that of 1545, which killed about 50 percent of the population. Traditionally, the belief was that the pathogen was typhus, but more recent analysis of symptoms and the etiological mechanisms implicated call into question this diagnosis. The strongest theory at present has been advanced, separately, by historical epidemiologists J. S. Marr and Rodolfo Acuña Soto, who have made convincing arguments for a disease of New World origin, arenavirus hemorrhagic fever.19 Acuña Soto has implicated the shift from drought to high humidity in the 1540s as driving rodent population and disease dynamics that were then transferred to the human population. Thus, the shift from very dry conditions during the Conquest era—especially during the 1530s—to the wettest period of the last seven hundred years (1542–54) was the ecological catalyst for the event. While there was not a similar climate reversal in the 1570s that would explain the 1576

48

|

Chapter 1

outbreak, the virgin soil epidemic paradigm helps to explain the return of the virus. Since 1546, while the cocoliztli disease reservoir remained strong in local rodent populations, the sector of the population lacking immunity to the disease had been steadily growing. Thus, the disease’s complex ecology (involving the onset of a millennial-scale pluvial, the meeting of biotic communities from two previously separated continents, the development of a large rodent population, and the presence of a large human population without immunity) was allowed to play out once more before disappearing into obscurity. Climate extremes influenced human health in ways beyond the ecology of etiological mechanisms, as we saw in the cocoliztli outbreaks of 1545 and 1576. In many cases, the hardships posed by the agroecological stresses initiated by climate anomalies (stresses such as acute malnutrition, exhaustion, and insufficient shelter) could substantially increase the rates of morbidity and case fatality, while also decreasing fertility and demographic resurgence following the epidemic. Case mortality rates during epidemics of crowd diseases such as smallpox and measles, for instance, rise substantially when the infected population is acutely malnourished. Moreover, agroecological stress can also increase morbidity by causing crowding when accessing limited food supplies and gathering in places with adequate shelter. Did colonial epidemics occur more frequently with climate extremes? Available evidence suggests that, yes, the outbreak of disease was strongly correlated with climate-induced agroecological stress. The Tlaxcalan data—which offers good estimates for all relevant factors: disease, demography, climate, and agroecological stress—can be used to answer this question. In Tlaxcala, years with epidemics correlate exceptionally well with years with statistically significantly climate anomalies. Of the thirty-four unique outbreaks of disease between 1519 and 1810, 91 percent of epidemics coincided with either a statistically significant PDSI extreme (of at least one standard deviation) or with reported agroecological stress that led to malnourishment. In fact, either PDSI or agroecological stress—taken individually, not together—correlates with the outbreak of disease in about three-quarters of all cases (74 and 76 percent, respectively). Only the cases of 1566, 1623, and 1735 have no discernible connection with climateinduced hardship. While it is important to remember that correlation is not causation, this evidence strongly implicates climate in sickness and death in colonial Tlaxcala and, likely, throughout central Mexico. By 1580, the case was closed, with Serna winning his petition and subsequent litigation, meaning that Tepexpan and Tequiciztlan lost control over a large

Water marks

|

49

tract of land. Lakeside communities like these had seen many ebbs and flows in this lake system. In this case, they had adjusted their resource use accordingly, shifting from salt production, to worms and grasses, and to agriculture when appropriate. As the failed litigation against Serna demonstrated, however, life at the water’s dynamic edge had lost the flexibility needed to respond to climatic and hydrological variability. Serna described the land in terms that avoided recognizing any prior cultivation or any current use, using words such as “an uncultivated plain” (heriazo llano), barren lands (están yermas), and that “they were ready to be worked and cultivated that do not look to have [ever] been cultivated” (unas tierras heriaças que estaban por labrar y cultivar y no pareçian aberse cultivado).20 The community was specific about its past and present uses, but failed to convince the judge that such cultivation had taken place or would in the future. In the short term, the case shows the inability of the colonial legal and bureaucratic system to accommodate—or even contemplate—the dynamic natural rhythms of highland life in the Little Ice Age. The rigidity of Spanish legal standards for prior use proved prejudiced against the flexible and adaptive agroecological strategies that seemed necessary to make life work—quite literally—at the water’s edge.

Managing Excess At virtually the same moment that Tepexpan and Tequiciztlan lost control of their lakeside lands, climate-induced hydrological shifts also propelled action in San Juan Teotihuacán and San Agustín Acolman. In fact, San Juan had long recognized the economic value of the aquatic landscape it inhabited. The Teotihuacán Valley functioned as the main thoroughfare for muleteers and cart traffic between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, and the abundant waters allowed the town to function as a key roadside station. Baths and ample stables were available for the mules, horses, and donkeys that hauled and carried goods. Perhaps most importantly, the humid soils made available an abundant supply of grasses and feed for the stables. The town possessed a large, full-service inn where travelers could rest and enjoy some of the local foods and drink, especially its famous pulque. All this would have been possible without the pluvial. Yet climatic conditions in the sixteenth century made these resources more bountiful than before or after. Immediately downstream of the church, the town had constructed and operated a water-powered grist mill by the 1570s, at a distance of “a shot of a crossbow”

50

|

Chapter 1

from the monastery. The mill was a substantial investment that involved new canals going to and from it, the construction of a mill house, and—most importantly— the installation of a complex water-driven mill, complete with interlocking gears and shafts that turned expensive millstones. There is little doubt that the design, execution, and management of the entire operation was contracted from outside the town. Unfortunately, no documents have been located regarding these investments. By the 1570s, apart from private residences and fields, the town had a church, hospital, inn, government offices, and a royal munitions factory (salitre), which used local labor to harvest wood from the Patlachique range and to extract saltpeter from nearby caves. Thirty laborers worked full-time in the salitre. San Juan Teotihuacán, then, was no ordinary town. It thrived as much from industry as from agriculture, and it must have accrued a substantial technical and industrial skill set that was repurposed in many new scenarios. The town also sought to profit from its water supply. It seems that Teotihuacán had always assumed some special rights to its water and thought that it could manage its distribution to (paying) downstream users. The town had effectively monetized its spring water in exchange for annual cash or tribute payments. In 1578, the town imposed new payments from the town of Acolman, which had followed Teotihuacán’s lead and installed a grist mill beside the Augustinian convent. For four years (until 1582), Acolman provided an annual sum, but ceased payment when San Juan upped the rate from some agricultural products (chickens, etc.) to one hundred pesos a year. In 1584, San Juan litigated, asking for not only its annual payment, but the two years of back payments.21 If those were not made, Teotihuacán threatened to cut off the water supply to Acolman’s new mill. In an era of vast hydrological wealth, San Juan’s demands had little traction. Assessing the hydrological situation for what it was, Acolman testified that the waters were too plentiful to control and, consequently, it was impossible for San Juan to cut off or redirect the water. The fluvial geopolitics of the valley were very complex. Teotihuacán and Acolman held many pockets of noncontiguous territory, such that water actually flowed from the village of Teotihuacán to lands controlled by Acolman, and then back through lands controlled by Teotihuacán, then Acolman, and then Teotihuacán once again. Thus, Acolman’s response was not to threaten Teotihuacán with cutting off water, but to flood the dependencies of Teotihuacán by rerouting the water. Even though Teotihuacán’s gambit failed, both it and Acolman remained flush with water, operating their mills until the end of the pluvial.

Water marks

|

51

It seemed that Teotihuacán had learned an important lesson: water had become ubiquitous, and its primary risk—at least the risk recognized by the court—was overabundance, not scarcity. Amid pluvial conditions, the Crown granted water rights to most users who could demonstrate their projected use would not prejudicially alter flow downstream. The problem was not how to distribute a limited resource, but how to protect downstream users from excessive and unpredictable flows that resulted from upstream modifications. When safe use could not be proven, rights were generally not granted or were subsequently withdrawn. As quick learners, the town’s elite reversed their strategy in dealing with the threat of yet another grist mill opening. This time, it was a Spaniard (Cristobal Gudiel) who petitioned the viceregal government for the right to establish a mill, and this time the threat would be located in town, in the Ayotzinco district, a few hundred meters upstream from the town’s wetland, beside a large ahuehuete. Gudiel already had a house in town, owned the salitre there, and had agricultural properties in the valley. The mill would have given Gudiel an enormous economic and political footing in the community. Yet it was not on these grounds that the town opposed the petition, nor because the proposed mill would undercut the economics of its own mill, which they had been operating for more than a decade. The town’s lawyer did not even bother to refute the defense’s testimony that the operators of the Teotihuacán mill lacked expertise to keep turning at full capacity. Normally, claims of economic prejudice would be the first line of attack for plaintiffs. Nor did the town suggest that the mill infringed on their rights to the town’s spring water. Rather, Teotihuacán focused its case on the downstream dangers posed by altering stream and spring flow at the headwaters of the Río de los Manantiales. For a community built within a marsh to declare a fear of excess water was a rhetorical feat. As seen above, already in the earliest phase of the pluvial, in the 1540s, the community seemed to embrace the marshland, architecturally and spiritually. The construction of the Franciscan church and monastery in 1548 at the edge of the marsh, with baths, springs, and canals, along with expressed associations between water and fertility, certainly suggests a double standard during the litigation with Gudiel. Clearly, the town’s opposition was intended, mostly, to limit Spanish investment and preserve local autonomy. Gudiel’s luck, however, had run out by the 1580s. Just as he made his petition for the mill and associated canals in town, a decade of heavy rains left the site extremely saturated, with floodwaters reaching a peak in September of 1585. The 1585 litigation produced a detailed map and prolix descriptions of the town’s

52

|

Chapter 1

FIGURE 5 The Gudiel map (1585), showing the hydrology of San Juan Teotihuacán. The map was produced by Cristobal Gudiel at the behest of the Spanish corregidor, Juan Lopez Catho. Archivo General de la Nación, #1167. AGN Tierras, Teotihuacán against Cristobal Gudiel, fol. 12.

hydroscape (figure 5). From this documentation, we learn that common areas of the village were established in the immediate vicinity of natural pools for recreational bathing, an activity still fondly remembered by many in the town. Other aquatic sites were reserved for cleaning of both nextamalli (lime-soaked maize) and clothing. No roads or buildings were located within the springs zone in the sixteenth century and were probably absent until the late nineteenth century. The historical toponomy of town districts—mostly forgotten today—revealed its aqueous roots. Take, for instance, the sites of Ayotzinco (Place of Turtles), Atezcatzonco (Lake Headwaters), Ahuehuetitlan (Ahuehuete Grove), Atezcatzinco (Little Lake), or Atezcalac (Lake Water, a term used for the stream that flowed from the wetlands). Smartly conceived, but ultimately ineffective, Gudiel’s strategy was to show that more water could do no further harm to a town built within the marsh itself. Teotihuacán’s strategy was to show that their urban planning represented a delicate balance that should not be disturbed. Overall, both sides described

Water marks

|

53

aquatic excesses in the town (either as opulence or peril), a situation that could be understood all too well by viceregal authorities, located themselves in a place (Mexico City) experiencing the same overabundance problem as Teotihuacán. The sympathies of viceregal officials were played on yet again, in 1603, when plans were made to relocate (congregate) the community of Los Reyes to San Juan Teotihuacán. In this case, too, the event occurred simultaneously with a pluvial surge. Judging by flood reports at the time, the colonial palustrine maximum was reached during this decade. Here, one of San Juan’s dependencies resisted its relocation to the district cabecera, citing “a very bad and boggy site that floods in the rainy season” (el sitio es muy malo y çenegoço por que en tiempo de aguas se anega), preferring instead the town of San Martín because it was “an elevated site to which the water cannot reach.”22

The Hydrographic Archive The Colonial Mexican Pluvial occurred coincidentally with what happened to be the most critical phase of Spanish colonization—that is, the redistribution of property and resources, the codification in law of these rights, and the determination of the character of central Mexico’s environment. Indeed, climate-induced diseases in the 1540s and 1570s, and likely climate-aggravated diseases in the 1590s and first decades of the 1600s liberated property from indigenous hands and thus contributed to Spain’s own legal imperative to codify and describe the new kingdom in image and text. But regardless of why (and why then), the coincidence of the pluvial with record-keeping left a deep hydrographic archive of the pluvial, one that for decades and centuries after the waters had receded would provide an indelible snapshot of a highly anomalous aquatic world. Take, for instance, the coincidence of the pluvial with the creation of the Geographic Relations, or Relaciones geográficas. In 1577, the Crown ordered that the territories of the Kingdom of New Spain be described and assessed, in terms of both their human and natural resources. The instructions set out by the Crown stipulated fifty different aspects of the territory that should be described and, ideally, mapped. The task of fulfilling the Crown’s request for geographic information for the Teotihuacán Valley fell to the top Spanish official (corregidor) of the region, Francisco Castañeda. In 1580, he oversaw the production of a large-format map of the valley, focused mainly on the middle and lower

54

|

Chapter 1

watersheds (figure 6). Drawn with sepia-colored ink on multiple pages adhered together to form a large canvas (145 × 61 cm), the map displays elaborate hydrological and transport networks, drawn surprisingly to scale.23 What really surprises, however, is the complexity of the irrigated landscape between San Juan Teotihuacán and the town of Tepexpan. Seven artificial bifurcations of the river channel are shown. Clusters of rural houses are located very deliberately. The central irrigation zone between the convent of San Agustín Acolman and the settlement of Santa Catarina is, appropriately, devoid of any inhabitants. The map details the inlets and outlets to and from the river system and the two indigenous mills (one in San Juan Teotihuacán and the other near the convent of Acolman). The representation of the village of Teotihuacán includes detailed characteristics of the location of dozens of springs and their placement within the complex hydrological network of the village. The Relación geográfica of Teotihuacán, then, demonstrates an intimate knowledge of local hydrology across a vast swath of the valley. In image, as in text, Castañeda consistently portrays an aquatic landscape. With respect to the entire zone between Teotihuacán and Tequiciztlan, he affirms repeatedly that the region is “cold and humid,” a description that would seem— today—completely inappropriate, given the sunbaked terrain. As Castañeda notes, Acolman was situated “between irrigation canals”; Teotihuacán “among water springs and canals, and is all covered by springs of water”; Tequiciztlan “is located by the great lake and among irrigation canals”; Tepexpan “is largely swamped and between canals.” Repeatedly, Castañeda juxtaposes this wet region with the surrounding sujetos (literally, “dependencies,” but better “allied towns”) that are in “cold and dry lands and lack any water except in artificial ponds [jagüeyes].” Acolman is where “the San Juan River splits into three large irrigation canals with which a swath of land almost a league and a half [6 km] wide is irrigated” and “remarkably fertile in pasture and agricultural goods.” Teotihuacán is “very abundant in water and has many springs in a small area from which proceeds a large river along which the natives have a [grist] mill. This water irrigates two leagues [about 8.4 km] and its waters reach the lake [of Tetzcoco].”24 Maps such as the Relación geográfica of the Teotihuacán Valley, or the maps in the Serna or Gudiel cases, were common products during the 1580s and 1590s. In fact, the last quarter century of the sixteenth century exceeds all others in cartographic production. Taking the quantity of maps as a proxy for the intensity of landscape description, I analyze a catalog of fifty-seven maps (all preserved

FIGURE 6 Castañeda’s map of the Teotihuacán Valley, produced for the Relación geográfica in 1580. The sepia-ink map, 145 × 61 centimeters, is kept in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain. The original map (right) is juxtaposed with a schematic rendition (left). Streams are represented with dark lines, springs with small dots, mills with an M, roads with light gray lines, rural settlements with gray squares, and topography with blurred ovals and discs. Villages are indicated with four different symbols, depending on the cabecera (head-town) to which they belong: blocks (Tequiciztlan), octagons (Tepexpan), flowers (Teotihuacán), and diamonds (Acolman). The head-towns themselves are indicated with stars inside one of those four village symbols. Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, Archivo General de Indias.

56

|

Chapter 1

FIGURE 7 Map production in the Teotihuacán Valley by quarter century. All but four of the maps are located in the Archivo General de la Nación. The others are found in the municipal archive of San Martín de las Pirámides. in national or municipal archives) that focus on either the Teotihuacán Valley as a whole or on a subdivision of the basin. The catalog is comprehensive and exhaustive, although it excludes large-scale maps that show the Teotihuacán Valley as a small part of the regional setting. The catalog is summarized in figure 7, which reveals two waves of activity: the first during the Mexican pluvial and the second during the eighteenth century. Two extended periods of cartographic inactivity are evident: the first until 1575 and the second between 1618 and 1719. The first is easily explained by the lack of a Spanish colonial administrative presence in the early years after the Conquest. The second, however, lacks an easy explanation. Does this lacuna reflect the overall paucity of archival sources at this time or the paucity of conflict over resources during a period of low population density? Probably both factors contribute. Yet, it is also true that the flurry of mapmaking between 1576 and 1617 made it less pressing in subsequent decades. During this phase, a new map was produced every other year, more or less. Copies of the maps from the earlier era would then resurface in the later period as evidence presented in litigation, a point addressed later in this book.

Interpreting the Pluvial The hydrographic archive was not simply a product of Spanish legal customs and a sudden shift in property and administrative patterns following the demo-

Water marks

|

57

graphic collapse of indigenous populations. The pluvial, itself, was a direct impulse. The floods were a source of grave concern and wonder. Indeed, some speculated that the sun was failing the new colony and that the floods were God’s punishment for the human failure to fulfill its spiritual and moral duties. The interpretation of water—either too much or too little, in the right or wrong places, at the right or wrong times—was closely tied to its social and cultural importance. It was meaningful to rich and poor, natives and newcomers, in secular as well as religious discourses, and to hydrologists, cosmologists, and astrologers. This is amply illustrated by flooding in the first three decades of the seventeenth century. Let us return to the debates about flooding in the viceregal capital in order to reveal some of the ways in which the pluvial was interpreted, and thus remembered and recorded for posterity. Just months after the 1629 inundation of Mexico City, architect and Carmelite friar Andrés de San Miguel described in detail for his Majesty the cause of the current cataclysm. The problem, he wrote in 1630, was in the “change in weather in the last few years,” which he qualified as a change “in the way that it rains”: It used to be temperate, raining most always by day, beginning at one or two

until four or five in the afternoon, such that one day’s rainfall would be cleared

up by the next, causing little rise in the lake. Nowadays it rains at all hours, and more commonly at night than day. . . . While in years past the torrential downfalls did not remain on the ground long after the sun came out to clear up

the land and make it ready for more rain, the rains these last years . . . are con-

tinuous, drench the land and greatly enrich and augment the springs . . . such that one day of these rains has greater effect than a month of crazy downpours.25

For Friar Andrés, “the change in the weather” was actually quite complex. In Friar Andrés’s account, rain came day after day with little respite while the sun evaporated little of what accumulated. Extreme convective rainfall events (the usual type of precipitation in the tropics, driven by high evaporation rates and associated with downpours) were conspicuously absent, although this had little impact on groundwater recharge and lake extent. In modern terms, he characterized the changing precipitation patterns as constituted by a shift from convective to frontal showers (the type of precipitation driven by the interaction of two different air masses, often resulting in lighter rainfall), increased cloud cover, falling rates of evapotranspiration, and deep groundwater recharge. From what we know about the climate of his time, his assessment was correct, except

58

|

Chapter 1

for his neglect of temperature, the observation of which (especially at the scale of just one or two degrees Celsius averaged over the course of a year) was very difficult and perhaps impossible without thermometers. The climate synopsis offered by Friar Andrés is replicated in a letter written by Viceroy Cerralbo to the king, in October 1630, in which he prayed “for a few years of temperate rainfall” to follow “these rainy ones.”26 Friar Andrés was a renowned hydraulic engineer and architect, designing bridges, canals, and dams, along with many monasteries. Apart from his letter addressing the state of the desagüe (the project to drain Mexico City) and the predicament of Mexico City after the flood of 1629, he wrote a few treatises on astrology, engineering, and water, all in the 1630s.27 Born in Spain, he had moved to New Spain in the 1590s, when waters had receded somewhat from the peak years of the 1580s. This meant that he watched—since his arrival—the growing extent and threat of water as humidity spiked again in the first decade of the seventeenth century, remaining wet until at least the early 1620s, and then cataclysmic in 1629. His account of the rising floodwaters was remarkable for its sometimes modern hydrological perspective, an accurate description of how the precipitationinduced pluvial influenced central Mexico as a whole. Whom did he blame for the floods? No one, really, although he heaped scorn on the architects of the desagüe, who had wasted time, money, and labor on ineffective remedies that worsened the flooding. Predicting a long and unequivocal rise in waters, Friar Andrés recommended building good infrastructure to cope with the problem. By extension, the architects of the desagüe failed to see the writing on the wall (i.e., the pluvial) and thus condemned the city to disaster. In a work written at the end of thirty-five years of wetland growth, Friar Andrés dug deeper into the causes of the pluvial, ultimately reinforcing its depiction as inevitable and blameless. Mexico’s growing humidity was part of a global event that functioned on a millennial, not decadal, scale. He addressed not only the underlying causes of “the growth of springs and rivers,” but “also all the oceans.” It is unclear whether or not he knew of other examples where humidity was on the rise at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Throughout this lengthy treatise, he argues that humidity originates in the deepest entrails of the earth, mostly in high mountainous areas. In his hydrological model, subterranean water conduits connect oceans to mountains, their flow held constant in normal conditions by the opacity of land that guards water underground. With heavy rainfall, he notes, this surface is slowly washed away,

Water marks

|

59

opening new pathways for groundwater to escape, thereby filling rivers, valleys, and ultimately oceans. Thus, Friar Andrés’s “change in the weather” operated at two scales: the decadal and millennial. He recognized decadal-scale climatic patterns (i.e., “a change in weather in the last few years”) but located this change within a climatic “shift” of a much longer duration. Moreover, the process of humidification was not only natural but essentially locked in a positive feedback loop that humans could do little to alter. This was not a bad thing. It could not be. In his treatise, entitled Del natural origen y principio de las fuentes y ríos (Of the natural origin and beginning of the springs and rivers), he argued that the pluvial was part of Divine Providence, a plan put in action many years before the discovery of the New World.28 For Friar Andrés, the current humidity did not have a peccatogenic origin—that is, human sin did not incite the wrath of God, a popular idea among his religious contemporaries. Instead, San Miguel’s God was beneficent, and so, too, were rising waters. While Friar Andrés did not merge the multidecadal “change in the weather” and millennial-scale shifts into a single, coherent theory of the pluvial, the two were not opposed to each other, and both were considered an expression of God’s will. Ultimately, what stands out as especially important in San Miguel’s interpretation of extreme wetness in Mexico City is not whether he got the science “right” or if he had a unified theory of divine providential pluvials. The crux of his argument was that the precipitation trends were “natural” (i.e., not anthropogenic) and that high humidity, per se, was neither penance nor problem, but an opportunity, a challenge. There was neither reason for Mexicans to liberate themselves from humidity nor hope that the humidity would be or could be conquered. The only remedy was to cope and adapt, which was best accomplished by building smart and appropriate hydrological infrastructure, the type of solution for which he was extremely well suited and well trained. San Miguel’s idea that providential climate change could be to blame for the catastrophic flood of 1629 was a radical proposition and one that few, if any, other commentators actually shared. Not even the religious supported these ideas. More popular then, and now, has been the argument that the early colonial diffusion of Spanish agriculture on surrounding hillsides caused catastrophic soil erosion and the alluviation of rivers, lakes, and wetlands (i.e., Alfred Crosby’s much celebrated Columbian Exchange thesis). This latter position is exemplified by a text written by royal cosmographer Enrico Martínez (to which Friar Andrés’s text was appended) that explained the

60

|

Chapter 1

1629 flood as the outcome of erosion and siltation produced by this early biotic exchange from the Old World to the New World. Martínez was the architect of the first (failed) drainage project of Mexico City in 1607–8 and was a publisher and astrologer. The Martínez argument first appeared in 1606 within a larger volume he authored on astrology and was then more widely disseminated after 1615 by Friar Juan de Torquemada, a renowned scholar, whose writings have held considerable weight in modern historiography.29 Martínez was born in Germany and schooled in Europe, where he trained as an astrologer, writing about celestial effects on Earth. Like Friar Andrés, Martínez immigrated to Mexico from Spain in the 1590s, but unlike the Carmelite friar, he rose quickly within the colonial bureaucracy, being awarded the title of official cosmographer for the Spanish Crown in Mexico, a post that Friar Andrés clearly felt that Martínez did not deserve. To say that Friar Andrés simply disagreed with Martínez would be to misread the ensuing debate. An acerbic man by nature, the friar could not hide his resentment of the royal favor afforded Martínez, whom he called “an impostor with only a foreign title who wanted to get involved in, and give opinions on, matters which he did not understand.”30 Martínez, however, was also an accomplished writer and printer, by which means he published his most complete and most cited work, his Reportorio de los tiempos y historia natural desta Nueva España (1606). The work sought to rectify previous and inappropriate interpretations of Mexico’s astrological condition, while also providing some chapters with historical material and almanac forecasts. Some parts of the Reportorio were written while Martínez was still in Spain (ca. 1591), while others were inked as late as 1605. The third treatise, which examined “some particularities of New Spain,” was written shortly after 1599, and certainly before the heavy rains of 1604.31 There is little doubt that Martínez identified cooling and humidity as a credible, and increasingly important, problem. By the time he sat down to write his astrology of the New World, the land he lived in was seen as degenerating, overly humid, and emasculating of mind and body. In his Reportorio, he noted that sublunar “generation and corruption” was afoot and expected important astral conjunctions in 1606. Based on his calculations for the conjunction of Saturn and Mars in 1606 (and, I would assume, because of his own climate experience in New Spain in the last few years), he predicted mass mortality. For 1606, his almanac called for heavy rains to begin in May, one or two months earlier than normal, and to continue until September, noting ominously that only

Water marks

|

61

divine providence could intercede to attenuate the effects of the poor climate. The celestial conjunctions of 1606 would be similar to those that occurred in 1519, 1546, and 1576. In all three cases, he noted, millions died, particularly the phlegmatic natives. Similar to Friar Andrés de San Miguel, Martínez also noted the existence of longer-term shifts (mudanças) in the weather (tiempo), which could cause the rise and fall of civilizations. Martínez notes that “experience has shown a shift in the temperament of the land in New Spain as elsewhere in the world, such that some [lands] that used to be hot, are now temperate or almost cold. We also see that some nations that flourished in arms and letters in the past are almost barbarous, and others that used to be wild now govern the world.” According to astrological logic—which he spells out clearly over the next two pages—man’s fate could be told from the celestial sphere, although both were clearly subject to God’s divine will. The consequences of this shift were obvious in New Spain: just as Greece lost its science, vigor, and might, classical Athens had degenerated to the lowliest people in Europe, given to torpid vices, most subjected to the Turks, and others to the Venetians. . . . And in what long ago used to be the cradle of

all the good arts and sciences, now there is such ignorance that there is not in all that land . . . a single study, nor do the people bother to teach their children

to read. . . . By extension, when the Spaniards conquered this land, natives were much more bellicose than at present, thus is it seen that all in this world changes.32

Thus, Martínez not only indicated a change in the climate, but also a parallel shift in the qualities of natives, who had become—in his view—ever more torpid and docile. After a number of consecutive years of flooding that followed the relatively dry 1590s, Martínez was hired by the viceroy, in 1606, to design and lead the infamous desagüe project, an immense and ultimately failed undertaking to rid Mexico City of its unfortunate humidity problem. Martínez’s plan to relieve the city of its rising waters ignored his own astrological predictions (which came true) and climatic observations (of a pluvial). Martínez, an astrologer without any academic knowledge or practical experience in architecture, engineering, or hydrology, would identify anthropogenic sedimentation in the valley as the cause of flooding, a subject he first discussed in his Reportorio.33 His plan thus

62

|

Chapter 1

focused on rectifying the human influences by excavating a tunnel to evacuate excess water from the basin, a plan so complex that it was not successfully finished until the twentieth century. Unlike Friar Andrés’s plan, which involved adapting to the pluvial, Martínez sought to conquer it. Twenty-one years after shovels hit the ground in September 1608, and months after the 1629 cataclysm endangered life in Mexico City, Martínez tried, once again, to defend his plan and its rationale.34 Almost word for word, he brought out the same explanation used in 1606. Despite admitting that “although, it has been quite rainy here lately,” he adhered to the logic that got him the job in the first place. To have now emphasized his climatic thesis would have proved his critics right about not only the nonhuman causes, but about his own ineptitude. Franciscan friar and historian Juan de Torquemada was yet another voice in this important conversation. Before the desagüe project was conceived in 1606, and before the floods of 1604 and 1607, Torquemada believed that the lake was actually shrinking, an observation that would agree with tree-ring growth at the time, which shows a lull in the pluvial during the 1590s. Torquemada attributed desiccation to two causes: (1) water diversion for irrigation, and (2) divine intervention. Believing in the power of God and the menace of water, Torquemada cited the fall of idolatry as a prompt for God’s beneficence. Such divine causation is fundamentally different from that proposed by Friar Andrés de San Miguel. In the latter case, growing wetlands were part of God’s original plan, were neither punishment nor reward, and required a complementary physiographical explanation of the mechanics of how and why water would become more or less abundant. For Torquemada, no such discussion of fluvial mechanics was necessary. Water moved by the merciful hand of God and His judgment of the faithful. He made no mention of either hillside erosion or lakebed siltation in 1604. After 1607, influenced by the floods and Martínez’s Reportorio, Torquemada changed his line of argument. Now, abandoning arguments based on divine will or irrigation, he carefully recited Martínez’s argument about valley sedimentation. He highlighted the spread of Spanish agriculture up to the high forested zone and the erosive effect of “rainfall that carries away the flower and essence of [the land] . . . such that one sees many fields already without soil, the underlying tepetate [hardpan] and tuff exposed,” thereby raising the surface of the lake bed.35 All three of the arguments supported by Torquemada (God, irrigation, and agriculture) not only tended to laud the faithful indigenous and blame Spanish farmers, but highlighted anthropogenic causes. After the floods

Water marks

|

63

between 1604 and 1607 (which continued for the next few years), Mexico’s elite searched for a solution and, it seemed, Martínez’s plan was a good one.

Conclusion The debates over the causes of flooding in Mexico City during the first decades of the seventeenth century reveal much about the political positioning and personal history of the authors. The signs of the pluvial were widely recognized, and all three authors were deeply aware of the abundance of water and what was at stake in making one or another argument. Both Friar Andrés de San Miguel and Enrico Martínez provided ample evidence to support the existence of climate-driven flooding, and yet only the former was willing to put aside anthropogenic causes. Avoiding taking a moral and political stand was not a popular choice in the early 1600s; nor does it seem to have been in the ensuing centuries. Choosing sides in the dichotomous debate between Friar Andrés and Martínez—between nature and humans as drivers of change—stretches back to at least the beginning of the seventeenth century, as is evidenced by the work of Torquemada and the royal favor afforded to Martínez. Already then, Friar Andrés found his climatic theory to be unpopular with his contemporaries. The floods of 1604 and 1607 truly energized and popularized the Martínez argument. As Mexico entered peak pluvial, the pluvial-induced hydrological conditions led to a denial of the pluvial itself and increasing support for Martínez’s position.36 Up until this time, and especially in the lull of flooding, after the early 1580s, the Relaciones geográficas, administrative and legal responses to flood events, and the textual and cartographic imagery of the pluvial did not stew over causes, find fault in human failures, or even see the pluvial conditions as negative. The early seventeenth-century floods changed that, and the rising popularity of Martínez’s Reportorio led to a growing and enduring consensus that his identification of anthropogenic/agrarian causes was right. Modern historians who have examined hydrological conditions in colonial Mexico have also overlooked Friar Andrés’s thirty-three-folio Relación and the rich descriptions and paintings of aquatic abundance, favoring instead the Martínez/Torquemada position, which highlights the governing role of human folly and malice. Perhaps the geomorphic evidence will be discovered that shows simultaneous erosion across central Mexican watersheds within decades of the Conquest. Yet, even if this archival miracle appears, it would not erase what

64

|

Chapter 1

we know about hydrology between 1542 and 1630. It would not justify ignoring either Friar Andrés or the Colonial Mexican Pluvial. Climate’s presence in Mexico’s deep and rich early colonial hydrographic archive reveals nature’s incipient role in human affairs, not just as catalyst within a bundle of anthropogenic causes, but as a millennial-scale climate event that drove humans to creative action, and often to death. Amid these concerns for the recognition of the hydrographic archive, I hope to remind the reader of the more elemental point of this chapter: Central Mexico’s hydrological dynamics—particularly its palustrine dynamics—are highly sensitive to climate change. There is, indeed, an uncanny correlation between flooding and the heaviest cycles of cold and wet that characterized the Colonial Mexican Pluvial from the mid-1540s until about 1630. Geographer Alfred Siemens has made this point convincingly in his conceptual framework of the hydrological dynamics of floodplain and endorheic wetlands, which suggests a high sensitivity to climate variability.37 Care must be taken to avoid fatalistic depictions of dry or supra-saturated wetlands. Substantive social, ecological, or climatic evidence should be marshaled to support any interpretations. Take the example of Mexico City, where the flood chronology fits extremely well with these climate trends. A cycle of floods—and social investment in hydraulic infrastructure—occurred between 1430 and 1450, at the tail end of the Aztec (or Mexica) pluvial. Efforts were redoubled in the 1480s and 1490s during another spate of flooding, once again closely mirrored by a climate that was unusually wet. Flooding ceased during the Conquest era, when waters in central Mexico receded; and they resumed again in lockstep with the Colonial Mexican Pluvial with floods in 1552–55, 1579–80, 1604–8, and 1623–35. These Mexico City trends are mirrored in Teotihuacán and, as we will see in the following chapter, in Tlaxcala, where simultaneous floods occurred in all three areas. Downstream of San Juan Teotihuacán, the Augustinian convent in the town of Acolman, which dates from 1539, flooded in 1553, 1606, and 1629. In the last of these years, the convent was under 4–5 feet of water (1.5 varas). Lest we believe falsely that the area escaped the floods of the 1580s, we know of flooding in 1580 in the town of Santa María Tlatechco, located near the Río de San Juan and immediately upstream of the convent. As the pluvial came and went, so too did the production of texts and images to be included in the hydrographic archive, as well as the debates, scientific theories, peccatogenic discourses, personal recriminations, land thefts, litigation, and business ventures. Mass mortality from climate-induced epidemic

Water marks

|

65

disease spurred the wholesale transfer of indigenous land to Spaniards and other natives. Mostly, however, the pluvial itself provoked humans to describe and paint it into memory. Apart from local maps made for specific purposes, some of Mexico’s most famous maps were painted as waters surged, such as the Uppsala Codex (ca. 1555), the Trasmonte map of 1628, or—looking forward to the terminal Little Ice Age—Sigüenza’s map of 1691.38 The Colonial Mexican Pluvial and its hydrographic archive did not get lost or even ignored. It simply became normalized or, to use a phrase common in colonial documentation, part of “time immemorial,” that is, a state without a definable beginning or end. In later chapters, we will see that subsequent generations would draw from this archive in creative ways, lamenting the rise of “drought” and “desiccation,” idealizing the aquatic world of the pluvial (which has continued unabated since Alzate’s time), or by “simply” copying, preserving, and instrumentalizing this hydrographic archive within the context of property and resource management. By the late eighteenth century, and continuing until the present, the rich hydrographic archive of the pluvial resurfaced time and again, often with awkward results. Memories of aquatic landmarks that no longer existed played havoc with post-pluvial property relations, while hydrographic phantasmagoria were drawn into hydrophilic discourses and national lamentations, unwittingly normalizing and celebrating an anomaly that had caused such despair. Before addressing that period, we will first revisit the pluvial, now exploring its agrarian ups and downs along the reaches of the Zahuapan River in Tlaxcala.

CHAPTER 2

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries Managing the Ecological Revolution in Early Colonial Tlaxcala

T

his chapter explores the process of agrarian, economic, and environmental change in early colonial Tlaxcala, especially within small-scale parcels of land farmed by the region’s indigenous population. We are afforded such a rare vista of patterns of local indigenous life and agriculture thanks to Tlaxcala’s unusually rich and varied early colonial source base, found in both regional and national archives, in published collections of wills and the minutes of town meetings, and in numerous series of annals produced by the local elite. Here, we leave behind for a moment our previous focus on the pluvial’s contested terrain (i.e., litigation, antagonistic business deals, hydrological debates, bureaucratic wrangling, etc.) and redirect our attention to the challenges of managing a tripartite ecological revolution emerging from the conjuncture of radical shifts in climate, biology, and demography. This chapter demonstrates and explains the paradox of geomorphic stability amid the ecological revolution from 1542 until 1630. New agrarian and hydrological strategies emerged in the sixteenth century in the context of not only a new hydro-climatic era but a new biological era. Native Mexicans would soon come to realize that the Mexica-era ecology had slipped away and that new socioecological strategies were needed to support life in the valley. I argue that the Tlaxcalteca demonstrated remarkably successful agroecological adaptation to one of the world’s most transformative moments: ecologically, politically, demographically, and climatically. Soils stayed put amid dynamic ecological

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

67

change. To make this argument, the chapter takes readers through the biophysical repercussions of this ecological revolution—water/land adaptations, vegetation responses to the 1545 climate-induced mortality crisis, interactions between the rich grasslands and watering holes, and so on—and then through agrarian adaptations, particularly experiments with sheep, pigs, and, most importantly, cochineal (Dactylopius coccus)—a small domesticated insect from which a red dye was produced for international markets. The cochineal industry in Tlaxcala was, I argue, brought down by the coldest decades of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, thereby preparing the ground for yet another agroecological shift—the rise of the pulque industry and its metepantli agrosystem—that fit better the climatic, ecological, and social contours of central Mexican society in the Little Ice Age.

The Politics and Geography of Tlaxcala The colonial provincia of Tlaxcala, located about one hundred kilometers east of Mexico City, was a politically atypical region of New Spain. The Tlaxcalteca allied with Hernán Cortés during the conquest of the Mexican capital of Tenochtitlán and continued this military alliance to conquer territories across Central America.1 Their political astuteness and power brought them the reward of a large colonial territory, the largest and strongest indigenous government in colonial Mexico, and some privileges within the Kingdom of New Spain, such as lower taxes and tribute, along with the absence of encomienda (an early form of labor exploitation used by the Spanish Crown).2 The indigenous government even held considerable fiscal power over Spaniards residing within the province. Indeed, the polity successfully increased its territory and protected the independence of Tlaxcala by resisting efforts to be amalgamated into a larger administrative district, meaning that Tlaxcalteca leaders had the undivided attention of their own Spanish gobernador.3 In doing so, they maintained their pre-Conquest system of four cabeceras (i.e., altepetl) with numerous dependencies (i.e., tlaxilacalli).4 Geographically, precipitation and temperature patterns in Tlaxcala are fairly typical for central Mexico, more or less mirroring those of the Valley of Mexico. Today, as probably in the past, Tlaxcala is slightly more humid and cooler than the capital, and definitely wetter than Teotihuacán. The Zahuapan River basin occupies the majority of the province. The river is a tributary to the Balsas River

68

|

Chapter 2

basin, originating in the Sierra Madre Oriental range in northern Tlaxcala and flowing southward through central Tlaxcala before merging with the Atoyac River at the southern limit of the polity. Its water then winds through the states of Puebla, Morelos, Guerrero, and Michoacán before finally draining into the Pacific Ocean. The basin of the Zahuapan River comprises roughly 165,000 hectares of land. Two-thirds of the basin lies upstream from Tlaxcala City, which is located on a small floodplain along the main channel of the Zahuapan River (map 12). The pre-Conquest indigenous population of Tlaxcala lived on the flanks and tops of the hills around Tlaxcala City, not in the floodplain where Spaniards ultimately decided to build the city in 1528 (map 13). As the colonial era wore on, floods occurred with increasing frequency, sweeping away urban infrastructure, polluting drinking water, and prompting local officials to record their occurrence.

M A P 1 2 The hydrology of Tlax-

cala. The maps show the hydrology of Tlaxcala City’s watershed within the basin of the Zahuapan River. The “lower” branch of the Zahuapan (defined, here, as the area below Tlaxcala City) is not shown. The Tlaxcala City watershed is 1,142 square kilometers. Hydrographical lines provided by INEGI.

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

69

MAP 13 The topography of Tlaxcala City. The urban grid of the colonial center of Tlaxcala City is shown. The colonial center was located on a floodplain of the Zahuapan River immediately downstream of a narrow valley, meaning that the city received the onslaught of many tributaries, which converged immediately upstream of the narrows. The pre-Hispanic centers (i.e., the head-towns of the four altepetl) were located on the flanks of hills north of Tlaxcala City. At the time of the Conquest and during the first century of the colonial era, the Zahuapan hydrological network above Tlaxcala City was much simpler than that of the Teotihuacán Valley. The river system was unified and lacked significant human intervention. No major dams or canals marked the landscape, although some check dams and agrarian interventions had unfolded in small hillside ravines. Some important sources of spring water existed, especially near Santa Clara Atzompan (meaning “headwaters” in Nahuatl), but such clusters of spring water did not substantially alter the overall discharge of the Zahuapan, which was driven by precipitation in the Sierra Madre Oriental. At the end of the seventeenth century, one witness suggested that the stream’s output— measured at a site well below Tlaxcala City after the confluence of the Atoyac and Zahuapan Rivers—was “more than three thousand surcos,” more than triple that of the Teotihuacán Valley.5 While this is a minuscule volume compared to major continental rivers, for a small regional river just seventy-five kilometers in length and with a watershed of seventeen hundred square kilometers, the flow is

70

|

Chapter 2

quite substantial. The slopes of La Malinche—like most conical volcanoes, such as the Cerro Gordo in Teotihuacán—discharge water to the Zahuapan through an efficient radial stream network (i.e., subcatchments E and F in map 12). Elsewhere, however, tributaries of the Zahuapan flow through a landscape of fasteroding cinder-cones and whose erosion over the Quaternary has obstructed drainage in interceding valleys (i.e., subcatchments A through D in map 12).

Tlaxcala in the Colonial Mexican Pluvial With regard to the sequence of flooding and growth of wetlands, the Colonial Mexican Pluvial left Tlaxcala with an extreme abundance of water. As was the case in Teotihuacán and elsewhere in central Mexico, the first flood event occurred in 1552, which destroyed the northern part of Tlaxcala City. Tlaxcalteca nobleman don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza described the event in his annals: This was when the Zahuatl River flooded. The water really broke its banks in

Atzompan and at the corner of Chalchihuatzin’s house it flooded deeply. It covered the bridge with stones. Everything was broken. On the other side of the river— all over the place— it did the same thing.6

Soil humidity did not substantially decrease until the mid-1590s, with peaks in the late 1560s and again between 1575 and 1579. These were truly exceptional years within an exceptional pluvial era. A second round of flooding began in the late 1570s and continued until the early 1580s. The province’s chronicler, Diego Muñoz Camargo, documented the floods, noting that the river floods here in some years, which results in notable harm to the natives whose houses are swept away and churches are inundated, as was done this very year [1582] when it flooded and carried off more than five hundred houses and was lost more than 50,000 pesos worth of cochineal and other products that the

natives produce, which occurred at the end of May. And it did not harm any persons because it happened in the early evening when nobody slept.7

One of the curious features of this passage is that Muñoz Camargo had already normalized flooding as though it were to be expected, thereby downplaying the

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

71

danger of the menacing waters. Tlaxcalan annalists noted other floods in 1579 and 1580, in Tlaxcala City and in the town of Atlihuetzyan.8 Yet it is worth noting the extraordinary nature of this flood. The total destruction of five hundred houses meant about 2,500 people lost their homes, about 2.5 percent of the total population of Tlaxcala, and probably about 25 percent of the population of Tlaxcala City. Note that these figures do not refer to houses damaged by, for instance, flooded basements, as is often the case with bloated statistics of flood damage reported by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. The houses—no doubt earthen constructions—were completely washed away. Furthermore, it is worth pondering the significance of 50,000 pesos, a great sum at the time, roughly equivalent to the average annual income of about 5 percent of the Tlaxcalan population. Traveling through the area of Tlaxcala—and Teotihuacán—in these years was Franciscan friar Antonio de Ciudad Real. In August and September 1585, Ciudad Real described a rain-saturated landscape. At the end of the rainy season, he portrayed his travels from Tecalli to Tepeaca as a difficult slog through “savannas or valleys very rain-soaked and full of water.” Then from Tepeaca to Tecamachalco, he found “a good road mired in water and full of puddles.” Numerous trips between Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco nearly ended in disaster when he was fording very full rivers.9 What stands out in the Tlaxcalan hydrology of the late sixteenth century— when we get our first panorama of Tlaxcala’s hydrology—are the numerous and extensive wetlands. The Ciénega de Santa Clara, the Ciénega de Atlancatepec, and the Ciénega de Nativitas are three large floodplain wetlands situated along the reach of the Zahuapan River, from north to south, respectively. Other smaller wetlands dotted the landscape. Whereas the Teotihuacán Valley had only a dozen or so hectares of palustrine land, Tlaxcala possessed thousands. In a series of texts written between 1578 and 1585, that is, at the heart of the pluvial, Muñoz Camargo detailed these aquatic conditions, piece by piece, assembling the river segments within the Zahuapan River basin, using río and arroyo to designate streams with greater or lesser flows. Beginning with the uppermost parts of the upper Zahuapan River basin and then progressing downstream toward Tlaxcala City (see map 14), Muñoz Camargo identified a large stream (“un arroyo grande”) that originated in the northern mountains of Tlaxcala, passed through the town of Tlachco (known today as Tlaxco), and then combined with another rivulet that descended from the town of San Pedro Tecomallocan, the Arroyo de Tecomatla.10 This water then entered into a very large lowland

72

|

Chapter 2

MAP 14 Wetlands in the Atlancatepec region in the Zahuapan River basin of Tlaxcala, circa 1580. The location and extent of wetlands should be taken as approximate. All of these wetlands have since disappeared except the Zacatepec (#9) and Xalnene (#4). See text for citations of relevant historical documents. depression (“por unas vegas y llanos grandes y espaciosos”), creating a series of wetlands that I have called the Atlantepetzinco Marsh.11 From the western margin of the Atlantepetzinco Marsh, a river flowed for a short distance before it, too, combined with “the water that comes from Santa Clara,” which emerged from the western portion of the upper Zahuapan.12 The origin of the western branch was a series of springs that Muñoz Camargo called atzontli (“headwaters”), which in turn formed the Santa Clara Marsh. The marsh was apparently more than thirteen kilometers in length.13 The wetlands did not stretch continuously but were broken intermittently by short streams, such as that which passed by the town of Atlancatepec. Using topographic and soil maps, one can estimate the location of the small areas of wetlands that separated the Atzompan and Atlancatepec Marshes.

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

73

The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, hereafter referred to as INEGI) publishes a series of 1:50,000 scale edaphic maps that can be used for such purposes. There is a close correlation between past or current wetlands and heavy fine clay soils (“vertisol pelico fina,” Vp/3) overlaid with fine alluvium (“fluvisol eutrico fina,” Je/3). Such soils are also deep (defined by INEGI as lacking tepetlatl horizons within the first meter). Of course, not all such soils originate in wetland environments. Mention of boggy soils near Atlancatepec, along with Muñoz Camargo’s reference to a near continuous wetland extending thirteen kilometers to the south of the Atzompan Spring, makes it possible to sketch the intermittent marshes between the Atzompan and Atlancatepec Marshes.14 Given the location of the wetlands within a riverine environment and the archival references that mention rivers running directly into them, the Tlaxcalan marshes can be classified as “floodplain wetlands.” The rivers connecting one wetland to another, however, were very short and lacked potential for alluviation. Thus, water passed through the wetlands by means of slow-moving flows of groundwater, entering at the upper part of the wetland and leaving at the lower end where groundwater then seeped into nearby fluvial channels. Such wetlands have been described as “windows to the water table,” an English term that resembles the Nahuatl term atezcatl, or “water mirror,” or lake.15 Water took on a fluvial form only below the Atlancatepec Marsh. At this point, the stream was named El Río Zahuapan. Thereafter, it flowed another forty-five kilometers to Tlaxcala City, finally encountering the southernmost depression of the Zahuapan River basin, the Nativitas Marsh, otherwise known as the Marsh of Tlaxcala (Ciénega de Tlaxcala).16

Old World Ungulates in New World Hands The Colonial Mexican Pluvial was, perhaps, an ideal time to introduce Old World livestock practices, particularly sheep and pigs, which eventually came to complement indigenous agriculture. Muñoz Camargo pointed out that “all over this area there are very good watering holes and pasture land for livestock, and many lakes and marshes with small and large extents.”17 Contrary to arguments of ungulate irruptions and mass environmental destruction, evidence from Tlaxcala demonstrates a cautious and slow development of herds. I have found evidence of only one Spanish estate (in 1592) that had extraordinary numbers

74

|

Chapter 2

of sheep (twenty thousand).18 Otherwise, in almost every scenario where sheep were raised, their numbers were moderate (between two hundred and five hundred) and often only slightly greater than the number of hogs kept at the same estate. Some specialized sheep operations, closely tied to woolen textile manufacturers, kept flocks of between fifteen hundred and three thousand sheep, but these operations were rare.19 These properties were usually located in what historian Rik Hoekstra has called “the wastelands,” mostly the flat valley lands with heavy soils that were not easily broken by indigenous agricultural technologies and remained mostly uncultivated until the Spanish estates.20 As the colonial era progressed, stocking rates seemed to fall even further. The Hacienda de Santa Clara had more than twenty-five hundred hectares of land at its disposal in 1686 and yet possessed a relatively tiny number of grazing animals (five hundred sheep and thirty cows) and focused mainly on cultivation (one hundred oxen, sixty threshing mares, twenty ploughs with necessary implements, twelve coas and fifty seeded fanegas of barley, eight of maize, thirty of vetch, and ten of beans).21 A census of Tlaxcalan haciendas from 1712 shows that this hacienda was below average, but even provincial averages indicate that much land remained underused. On the almost one hundred thousand hectares recorded in the census, there were fewer than fifty thousand sheep, stocked at a rate of 0.5 sheep per hectare, or fifty per square kilometer.22 The Hacienda de Cuamancingo exhibited almost identical stocking rates in 1652.23 Tlaxcalan haciendas stocked only one-fifth as many sheep per hectare as has been documented in northern central Mexico, such as the Mezquital Valley.24 Mainly, Spanish estates remained focused on grain production, with as many as two hundred oxen to pull the ploughs, as well as a number of hogs and sheep. As historian Carlos Sempat Assadourian has argued, in Tlaxcala “the expansion of Spanish land did not follow the path of sheep raising. To the contrary, it was a land of grains.”25 In fact, this focus on Spanish operators appears to be misguided. During the pluvial extreme circa 1580—when the descriptions of a water-saturated landscape became plentiful and varied—few Spanish agricultural operations existed. A handful of Spanish livestock operations had appeared in Tlaxcala by the late 1540s, but were denounced by the indigenous government (Cabildo) of the province of Tlaxcala. Most were thus terminated and removed by 1554. Nevertheless, between 1585 and 1604, Spanish estates had re-emerged throughout Tlaxcala, filling the great rural voids opened by indigenous depopulation.26 Tlaxcalteca, not Spaniards, dominated early shepherding operations in the province. Indeed, the indigenous government in Tlaxcala—that is, the Cabildo

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

75

de la Ciudad y Provincia de Tlaxcala—developed the earliest and largest flocks, with numbers ranging from ten thousand in 1542 to fourteen thousand in 1559 and fifteen thousand in 1593.27 Their sheep grazed on enormous tracts of lush (previously uncultivated) valley land in Amalinalco, Teoatlauco, and Mazatepec, all regions in northwestern Tlaxcala with extensive grasslands.28 Some midsize private indigenous sheep farms were established in the 1560s when the Crown awarded to native noblemen from Atlihuetzyan (a central town along the Zahuapan River) estancias (livestock ranches) for sheep in the flatlands in northeastern Tlaxcala, tens of kilometers from their home town of Atlihuetzyan.29 Despite ample watering holes and pastures, herd success was not guaranteed. Indeed, the flocks were difficult to keep alive, almost dying out in 1549 as ewes failed to birth, and then struggling again in the 1580s when shepherds mismanaged their flocks.30 After the first episode, indigenous governments in Tlaxcala, for instance, even hired Spaniards in the 1540s and 1550s to teach Old World agriculture.31 The timing of these high-mortality events coincides with pluvial extremes as well as with the cocoliztli events, suggesting links between climate, demographic collapse, and the health of flocks. On the other hand, price signals might have been most important. Falling demand for wool in the wake of the epidemic of 1576 caused the value of sheep to plummet, forcing many peasants to liquidate their herds, exchanging them for maize or butchering them for meat.32 As the human populations rebounded somewhat, and as international wool markets opened up, so too did interest in shepherding, although the apex of the shepherding rebound seems to have occurred about 1620, followed by a slow diminishing through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.33 Ultimately, the restrained investment in shepherding in Tlaxcala—despite the wealth of water and grass—is best explained by opportunity costs analysis. Tlaxcala was a land of relative natural bounty in close proximity to the largest markets in New Spain. Grazing took a back seat to other agrarian pursuits. Riverine and palustrine pig-raising ventures, for instance, proliferated after the 1580s. The earliest agrarian ventures in the Atlancatepec region of Tlaxcala sought to profit from the burgeoning pork industry, selling meat, bacon, and soap in both local and distant silver-mining markets.34 According to Muñoz Camargo, indigenous Tlaxcalan peasants were already specializing in hog products by the 1580s, specifically in areas around wetlands. He described “great wetlands . . . in which great quantities of pigs are raised.”35 Downstream, the area near Topoyanco “harvested a great quantity of . . . hogs because of the many marshes that are here and because the natives are given to raise much quantity

76

|

Chapter 2

of this livestock.” In fact, across the entire province of Tlaxcala both Tlaxcalteca and Spaniards “raise pigs in small sties [pequeños pegujales]” that “amounts to a large sum of this livestock.”36 The timing of these ventures and the location of their production leads one to wonder if the stocks raised in the cold, wet early colonial era were primarily of the Asian variety, perhaps newly imported from the Philippines, following the global reach of the Spanish empire. The short, stout Asian hog was very different from the European variety with long legs, claws, and snout. The former was penned, lived in sties close to homes, and enjoyed cool, muddy conditions. The European variety was a forest forager, using its agility to forage long distances in forest ecosystems.37 This was an animal—and associated ecology—that was unfamiliar to not only natives but to Spaniards too, perhaps developed in the highlands of New Spain where the animal, ecology, and knowledge converged in novel forms. There is reason to believe that the ecological relations necessary to develop this industry were developed by indigenous groups, particularly in Tlaxcala’s great wetlands. As revealed above, indigenous farmers in Tlaxcala were deeply involved in this wetland hog industry and not the forest variety. Muñoz Camargo noted that the pigs ate the roots of plants that grow in these wetlands.38 Other documents from the early seventeenth century make it clear that the pigs fed on tule, a large bulrush whose growth had been very much encouraged and tended to by native farmers since pre-Hispanic times, in order to produce baskets, mats, and many other household supplies. Indigenous farmers had recognized since the mid-sixteenth century that European livestock showed interest in consuming the tule.39 This wild plant was such a critical food source for ciénega pigs that a rental agreement from 1600 specified that the temporary rights to the hog farm near the Atlancatepec Marsh included passage via a neighboring estate into the Atlancatepec Marsh, so that “when the dry season came, the pigs could eat in the said wetland.”40 The estate being rented was surrounded by indigenous properties, many of which would be sold to the estate between 1595 and 1620. Not infrequently, the line of biotic diffusion was not from Spaniard to native (as one might expect), but from native to Spaniard. The earliest references to the industry are associated with the Tlaxcalteca, while estate records strongly suggest that Spaniards purchased their stock from the natives, and perhaps even relied on indigenous knowledge of wetland swine ecology.41 It is also true, however, that other Spanish estates cultivated a more traditional, European, upland swine industry. Upland hog

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

77

farms—in Spanish-dominated areas—let pigs graze in juniper savannas, “fattening” on the berries that grow on those trees.42 Spanish estate records often differentiated the forest hogs from the wetland varieties, calling the former “of the savanna” (de savana), and the latter “sty pigs” (de pegujales) or even pigs “of the land” (de la tierra), a term used for native animals.43 This latter term strongly suggests a non-European origin to the pigs raised in sties and wetlands. In sum, it seems that a very traditional Spanish-looking upland swine industry operated parallel to a new wetland swine industry that was likely led and innovated by indigenous farmers in Tlaxcala and probably elsewhere in central Mexico. This new wetland swine ecology indicates creative and productive uses of the new hydrology, ancient native plants, and new biota traveling across the Pacific on the Spanish galleons.

The Ecology of Collapse While Tlaxcala was exceptional geopolitically, its residents were as susceptible to disease as people elsewhere. Tlaxcala has some of the best available demographic data to back up this conclusion. The locally produced, Nahuatllanguage census (padrón) of 1557 is particularly rich, giving a good baseline from which to project backward (toward the Conquest), and to connect to subsequent colonial population counts, which lacked the depth of the indigenous count.44 The mortality events with the greatest impact (in terms of total case mortality and even case mortality rates) were the earliest epidemics: 1520 and 1545 stand out as truly exceptional, while 1576 was the last year in which a high-magnitude mortality event occurred (until the 1690s, when ~40,000 died, and again in the 1730s, when ~50,000 died, both of which are roughly equivalent to deaths in 1576: ~48,000). Other events hardly compare. In fact, the number of dead in 1520, 1545, and 1576 were eight, ten, and three times, respectively, more than the average case mortality of other pre-1630 epidemics. These demographic trends are depicted in figure 8. Many scholars of the environmental history of early colonial Mexico see disastrous consequences of demographic sixteenth-century collapse. In a study of Santa María Asunción, in the Valley of Mexico, anthropologist Barbara Williams argues that population decrease “would have caused abandonment of erosion control in the barrancas and on the terraces, leading to upper slope erosion of soil and archaeological materials and concurrent sedimentation and burial

78

|

Chapter 2

FIGURE 8 Population changes in colonial Tlaxcala. Square markers on the gray line identify the reports of Tlaxcala’s population in historical documents. Skopyk, “Undercurrents of Conquest,” chap. 4. of material on the lower slopes.”45 Geoarchaeologist Carlos Córdova identified significant soil erosion immediately after the Spanish conquest, which he associates with the “abandonment of lands on slopes and the lack of terrace maintenance.”46 Archaeologist Christopher Fisher, too, advanced this position for the Pátzcuaro Lake region in Michoacán, while Aleksander Borejsza drew similar conclusions for Tlaxcala.47 Both quantitative and qualitative evidence cast doubt on a link between demographic collapse and land degradation. First of all, the temporal patterns of land abandonment have been poorly understood. Most land would have been abandoned within a few decades of the Conquest. By estimating the number of hectares cultivated per person, and by multiplying this by the known population totals at various times of the colonial era, the total area of abandonment can be calculated and summed. The results of this calculation are presented in figure 9, which suggest that 64 percent of all land had been abandoned within twentyfive years of the Conquest and 80 percent within a little over fifty years. This means that even with more than fifty to one hundred–year lag times—to allow for entrainment and transport of sediment liberated from hillsides—Tlaxcala City should have witnessed great accumulations of sediment by 1629, when the last of the pluvial floods struck. Significant alluviation is not reported until the eighteenth century.48

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

79

FIGURE 9 Abandoned land in the Tlaxcala City watershed (hectares). For the methodology of determining total population, case mortality, and area under cultivation, see Skopyk, “Undercurrents of Conquest,” chap. 4. While such calculations provide a rough guide to when we should expect to see degradation resulting from land abandonment (if it occurred), descriptions of the ecological response of the Tlaxcalan ecology to demographic collapse enable a more qualitative assessment. These descriptions reveal that the mid-sixteenthcentury crisis inscribed itself on the Tlaxcalan landscape as ecological renewal, not transformation or degradation. As agriculture receded, herbaceous and arboreal vegetation regenerated. This process is visible through the prolonged and fiery discourse within the Tlaxcalan Cabildo, which sought to rectify the perils of empty granaries and expanding grasslands. The “grasslands discourse,” as I call it, continued for at least seventeen years (1551–67) and perhaps longer; minutes were discontinued after 1567.49 In total, twelve sessions addressed the problem of the expanding grasslands and the desire to reclaim them.50 The Tlaxcalan Cabildo understood all too well that the uncultivated lands would be lost if not utilized and, moreover, that the epidemic of 1545 had only expanded these wastelands, which it defined as grasslands.51 The Cabildo first mentioned the need to counter the spread of grasslands when it met at the end of April 1551, a month or so before the beginning of the planting season. Agricultural production had dropped significantly since 1545, and as farmers abandoned fields, grasses invaded the cultivated spaces, transforming them into “grasslands” (zacatlalli). Thus, on April 27, 1551, the Cabildo assembled to discuss the problem of abandonment and to hatch a plan to revitalize Tlaxcala’s shrinking agrarian sector: They discussed and united to speak because all over Tlaxcala there are many grassy agricultural fields [zacacuemitl]; the area within sight of churches should

80

|

Chapter 2

be cleared of grass [zacamoz]. If many macehualli [non-elite farmers with land]

are available, they will clear it of grass [quizacamozque]; if there are not many

persons, it is also possible that they will clear it of grass [quizacamozque]. The

land newly cleared of grass [zacamolli] will divide in two parts, belonging to the altepetl and church; where it produces maize it divides into two parts, the City takes one part and that belonging to the Church is the remainder. . . . As

such it progresses, year after year; the lands will be cleared of grass [zacamoloz] for the improvement of the fields.52

As seen above, the Cabildo’s minutes for that day repeat the compounded form of the noun zacatl (zaca-)—which appears in two nominal forms, zacacuemitl (grassy agricultural field) and zacamolli (land reopened after clearing)—and the verb zacamoa (to clear land a second time). Early colonial texts and NahuatlSpanish dictionaries define the verbal formation primarily as to reclaim land, and in only one instance is the focus on removing grass or other vegetation.53 This leaves open the possibility that grass or other vegetation was not present, or at least not in any significant amount. The use of standard tropes within this discourse threatens to discredit the text as little more than rhetoric. For instance, the Cabildo’s famous discourses on congregación utilized the Crown’s own rhetoric about the “protection of vassals,” the Nahua conceptualization of center and periphery, or elements of Franciscan moral discourse such as women’s honor and social degeneration.54 Yet unlike the religious metaphors, the nominal formations (excepting zacamolli, a derivative of zacamoa) are quite varied and leave no doubt that the primary task was to remove grass that grew up in fields. Most instructive is the word zacacuemitl (grassy agricultural field), which does not appear in any dictionary. Likewise, the minutes describe the presence of “much grass” (ueuey zacatl),55 “grassland” (zacatlaly),56 “land . . . covered by grassed” (tlally . . . zacayotimani),57 and simply “grass” (zacatl).58 Most tellingly, the minutes from December 18, 1553, make it clear that grass was literal and not figurative in the following phrase: “auh yn cuemitl ya miec yn zacaquizaya ic poliui yn tlayliztly” (there are already many agricultural fields that are coming up in grass by which maize cultivation is lost).59 While references to zacatl often denote actual grass regeneration, it is nevertheless important to understand that the deeply ingrained conventions in Nahuatl that connected grass with land abandonment helped to obscure the existence of woody regeneration. Nahuatl would have rendered nonherbaceous

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

81

vegetation such as brush and trees as tlacotl and cuahuitl, respectively. I have not encountered such references. Muñoz Camargo, on the other hand, writing in Spanish, described arboreal regeneration in the wake of field abandonment as the norm. Unequivocally, he stated that the epidemic of 1545 “ruined and finished off towns and places that are today nothing more than forests [montes].”60 Explaining the resurgence of secondary growth, as opposed to degradation, will necessarily be suppositional. Indeed, the set of factors that explain stability can range from every element within a system to just a small selection of them. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that indigenous agrosystems would inherently possess the seeds of their own destruction, so to speak. Nevertheless, a few words on the subject seem appropriate.61 Using a philological approach to indigenous wills (testaments) written in Nahuatl, it seems that early colonial Tlaxcalan agricultural fields were fire-ready and trained to auto-regenerate after abandonment. Much evidence exists for the presence of long-fallow field systems that used arboreal and herbaceous regrowth to restore soil nutrients after the cultivation of maize, a nitrogen-intensive crop, and the staple crop of central Mexico, then and now. Early colonial indigenous farmers fertilized soils only in part through the celebrated intercropping method often called the “three sisters”: that is, beans (which fix nitrogen), squash, and maize. Other methods included the addition of compost, kitchen refuse, and even “night soil.” Yet, as anthropologist Teresa Rojas Rabiela convincingly demonstrates, the basic means of maintaining fertility was through fallowing—in essence, a type of slash and burn—which allowed wild vegetation to repopulate fields before burning the fields and thereby releasing the nutrients stored in the accumulated biomass. For Tlaxcala, a vocabulary for fallowed land was present. Zacacuemitl referred to fallow fields, while zacamoa indicated newly recuperated land. A telling example is provided by a land dispute in the cabecera of Tizatlan from 1568 where a parcel is called yzacamolcuen, which translates literally as “his grasscleared-field,” a field recently recovered from the fallow stage. An indigenous will in Nahuatl from 1580 pertaining to the estate of the indigenous nobleman don Alonso Juárez lists 25 percent of nonhomestead (callalli) parcels as zacaquitimani, or fallowed. Some fallowed parcels are associated with trees— the only such references in the will where trees are mentioned—which further strengthens the conjecture that said land was in a fallowed state. Tellingly, I have not found examples of fire-intolerant species such as maguey and alligator juniper used as vegetated field boundaries until the end of the seventeenth century.

82

|

Chapter 2

As land became more affordable and widely available from one epidemic to the next, the intensity of cultivation decreased further. The epidemics of 1545 and 1576 initiated not only the “greatest labor shortage in human history” but an unparalleled surplus of land. The regeneration of vegetation after these epidemics constituted an enormous storage of nutrients that were utilized by future generations. The Cabildo’s recurrent complaints about perilous grasslands conceals the benefits provided by agrarian decompression. Until maguey populated rural Tlaxcala, fire and Spanish axes could be used to recycle nutrients from fields that may have lain fallow for more than a generation. The new long-fallow system is fully demonstrated by a comparison of land availability in pre- and post-collapse demography. Both Barbara Williams (using pre-collapse Nahuatl cadastral maps) and Susan Evans (using archaeological field data) assert that the average land base of pre-collapse central Mexicans was about 1.6 hectares, constituted by 0.5 hectares of callalli and 1.1 hectares of non-callalli land.62 Comparing this to post-collapse conditions, my examination of late sixteenthcentury indigenous wills shows that the size of the family’s callalli had not changed, but that now the average family possessed 5.1 hectares of non-callalli land. With such large tracts of land, there is little doubt that peasant households utilized a long-fallow system to maintain fertility. This argument agrees with the hypothesis advanced by Ignacio Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba when he suggested that indigenous agriculture in Metztitlán, Hidalgo, responded to depopulation by likely abandoning intensive agriculture for extensive slash-and-burn agriculture.63 His argument rests on the theory advanced by Ester Boserup, who found a positive correlation between population change and fallow length.64 This brief analysis, which I have expanded in previous works, demonstrates that when the crises of the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries struck, fields responded as rehearsed, regenerating as fallow, without degradation. Indeed, land abandonment reinforced the long-fallow system and fortified the auto-regenerative qualities of fields. As such, the perfect storm came and went without lasting damage to soil and water resources.65

The Rise and Fall of Cochineal This final section continues the discussion of native plants in native agriculture, forgoing discussions of Spanish estates and Old World biota that have dominated colonial Mexican agrarian history. This does not mean, however,

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

83

that native plants and native agrosystems remained customary and traditional after the Spanish conquest. Quite the contrary: the Conquest set in motion social, political, economic, and biotic forces that made possible new uses of old plants for new markets. Tlaxcala used its political power to maneuver itself into a position of leadership in producing for global and regional textile markets. Most importantly, Tlaxcalteca farmers led New Spain and the world in the production of cochineal. The venture became so successful that the indigenous Cabildo complained that peasants shirked their duties to produce maize, preferring instead to trade cash crops such as cochineal for grain. This made famine a likely possibility—according to the Cabildo’s rhetoric—and caused the granaries to sit empty.66 Tlaxcalteca had produced cochineal in the pre-Conquest period, but output soared in the 1530s and 1540s owing to a pent-up global demand. Possessing red textiles indicated power and wealth in many Old World cultures. Old World red dyes had lacked permanency and remained in short supply, and thus when Mexican cochineal arrived on world markets, textile manufacturers sought it out enthusiastically. In short order, the trade in cochineal reached enormous proportions, second in value only to the silver trade. Efforts to transplant cochineal production outside Mexico persisted until well into the nineteenth century, but with the exception of a small industry that developed in Peru, such efforts never paid dividends. As the largest and most quality-conscious producer of cochineal, Tlaxcala attracted the attention of sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers, who wrote in detail about the Tlaxcalan system of production.67 Dactylopius coccus had many wild counterparts, but the quality and quantity of the dye produced from these species did not match that of the domesticated species.68 The insect lives parasitically on various species of the nopal cactus (Opuntus spp.), usually Opuntus ficus-indica, feeding from the plant’s fluids, or “blood” (nocheztli) as it is known in Nahuatl. Heavy summer rainfall upset the insect’s nests on the nopal plant, and winter frost and snowfall could kill off the insect colonies. Thus, caretakers harvested the insects before June and reserved a “seed” population for the next year so that when the rainy season subsided, the insects could be reintroduced to the living cacti. During the dry winter months, cochineal farmers made two or three seedlings and harvests, taking care to shield the crops from the nortes that produced freezing temperatures and sometimes deep snowfall. In Oaxaca, climatic variance between high- and low-altitude regions made cochineal transhumance possible. The insects made the trip to the Sierra de Istepeje in May (and back to the valley in October) by

84

|

Chapter 2

way of baskets carried by farmers and their families. Cochineal insects had to be protected from intrusions of farm animals such as turkeys and later chickens, rodents such as mice and rates, armadillos, and some species of snakes, lizards, and other insects, such as leeches, grubs, worms, and an unidentified spiderlike creature.69 After the harvest, the insects required careful processing to preserve the quality of the dye, and then astute marketing was needed to ensure a profitable return on household labor. Intensive management of this industry required care of not only insects, but also the host plants.70 Opuntia ficus-indica exists only as a domesticated species and must be replanted with slips from the plant. Although the nopal can grow to heights of four to five meters, those that housed cochineal were kept no taller than two meters to facilitate extraction and to keep the leaves young and tender. Nopal plants thrive in soils amended with household waste and ash. Gonzolo Gómez de Cervantes stated in no uncertain terms that farmers needed to clear away all competing vegetation from the surrounding soil in order to maintain soil fertility, limit fungal infections, and keep out pests, such as oxen that ate the cactus vegetation. Nopal plants needed pruning and support with sticks. Moreover, a healthy cochineal plantation meant constant breeding of plants and animals. The parasite eventually depletes and kills the host plant, and thus farmers must consistently plant new hosts and reintroduce the insect to the plants after the latter have matured, a period of about one and one-half to three years from planting.71 Such prodigious labor inputs meant that one adult could hope to manage no more than twenty-five nopal plants.72 All of these considerations— cultivation, harvesting, replanting, and protection of plants and insects from cold, rain, pests, and competing vegetation—meant that the ideal cochineal garden was a very small enterprise of just twenty-five square meters, enclosed by corn stalks, mud walls, or live fences, and located in the immediate vicinity of the family’s house, where an abundant supply of familial labor could be found.73 Producers profited immensely from cochineal, and consequently cultivation spread quickly, providing starting producers with enormous profits. The minutes from the Cabildo’s meeting on March 3, 1553, indicate that production had increased substantially in the previous eight or nine years (i.e., since 1545) and that farmers from all over Tlaxcala planted nopal and seeded it with cochineal, including in the central and northern regions.74 Southern Tlaxcala and the neighboring province of Cholula were the most famous producers, but such fame likely resulted from the large population there, rather than any specific ecological or economic advantage that the region might have held.75

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

85

In 1553, the Cabildo moved to curtail cochineal production to just ten plants per person because it said the crop undermined the traditional social hierarchy (by making the poor rich) and caused widespread immorality (e.g., drunkenness, fornication, truancy from Sunday mass). The Cabildo also noted food production had dropped considerably because farmers focused only on their cochineal gardens. They deliberated about how the cochineal cactus, from which cochineal comes, is being planted

all over Tlaxcala. Everyone does nothing but take care of cochineal cactus; no

longer is care taken that maize and other edibles are planted. For food— maize, chili, and beans— and other things that people need were once not expensive in Tlaxcala. It is because of this (neglect), the Cabildo members considered, that

all the foods are becoming expensive. The owners of cochineal cactus merely buy maize, chili, etc., and are much occupied only with their cochineal, by

which their money, cacao beans, and cloth are acquired. They no longer want

to cultivate their fields, but idly neglect them. Because of this, now many fields are going to grass and famine truly impends.76

Although in December of that year the Cabildo assured that “a very great quantity of cochineal cactus was destroyed,”77 it made it clear that each person could own ten plants (“nochi tlacatl quivelitac matlactecochtly in piyaloz nohpalli”),78 a regulation that permitted at least two-fifths of familial labor to be occupied by cochineal. Even after 1553, cochineal continued to cause a considerable contraction of land use in indigenous farms.79 The boom did not last, and there is strong evidence that climate was the dominant factor in the decline of cochineal in Tlaxcala. The traditional explanation of the collapse of Tlaxcalan cochineal is demographic. Local officials argued that Tlaxcalan cochineal production started to fall after the 1576 epidemic, and despite efforts by Gobernador Alonso de Nava to rejuvenate production in 1585, by 1591 production had dropped by one-half in Tlaxcala.80 Yet cochineal production expanded greatly after the 1545 epidemic, the worst of all mortality crises. The collapse of cochineal in the decade after 1576 occurred everywhere (not just in Tlaxcala).81 Indeed, between 1576 and 1604, Tlaxcala’s population had fallen from more than 200,000 to 80,000, a nightmarish decline to be sure, but still much less than the 150,000 who died over two years between 1545 and 1546. Ultimately, Tlaxcalan officials were prescient. Although production decreased logically with each epidemic, it failed to rebound at any time

86

|

Chapter 2

after 1605. A “memorial” from 1620 declared that cochineal production in the Tlaxcala and Cholula region amounted to only a small part of the total by 1619 and that the price per unit dropped in Tlaxcala relative to that of the Oaxacan producers. The problem, ultimately, is not why production fell, but why it never rebounded in Tlaxcala after these events and then why it continued to fall from 1605 to 1631 even though the Tlaxcalteca population grew during the same period by about 20 percent. Geographer R. A. Donkin explains that the movement to Oaxacan dominance in cochineal supply was caused by three factors: (1) meteorological conditions (loss of harvest), (2) Indian mortality (loss of labor), and (3) poor maize harvests, which drove up maize prices and upset the balance of exchange between maize and cochineal, effectively driving down the value of the latter.82 His second point (population collapse) did not have differential impacts in Tlaxcala and Oaxaca and can be discarded. Yet his first and third points are more intriguing. Although the memorial of 1620 did not fully clarify the reasons for the collapse of such a rich and socially transformative industry, it suggested strongly that cold temperatures and excessive rainfall were to blame. Tlaxcala was far more susceptible to “the bad spells of cold that tended to hurt the harvests” than was Oaxaca, claimed the memorial.83 Once again, it is important to remember the susceptibility of Dactylopius coccus to rain (disturbing colonies and washing insects from the plants) or to cold (the domesticated insects would die or fail to produce red pigments if they were not protected). Needless to say, snowfall would be disastrous, not only to Dactylopius coccus, but to the delicate young plants of Opuntus ficus-indica that were needed to cultivate cochineal. As we have seen many times already, hydrological conditions in the 1570s and 1580s reached a maximum, causing not only widespread and recurrent floods in eastcentral Mexico, but maybe even contributing to a second round of arenavirus hemorrhagic fever. The same climatic conditions that made trees grow large and strong in the 1570s and 1580s proved very difficult for cochineal. Indeed, as drier conditions set in in the 1590s, cochineal might have rebounded in Tlaxcala if it had not been for the spate of terrible cold that lasted until roughly 1625. Fall frosts were more common at this time than during any other period recorded in the Agroecological Index. Another surge of cold and wet conditions appeared again between 1604 and 1610. Deep winter snowfall and strong winds in January 1610 killed livestock and brought down trees. This storm hit at the peak cochineal period and undoubtedly ruined cochineal gardens precariously supported by sticks.

Rising Waters, Perilous Grasslands, and Empty Granaries

|

87

Although climate stressed conditions in Oaxaca, too, this region had the distinct advantage of being able to adapt by moving downslope, to warmer conditions. Dactylopius coccus in Tlaxcala—a mountainous zone with no land below 2,150 meters—had no warmer climes to retreat to.84 After relatively warm times in the early colonial era, the increasingly cold and damp climate of the later sixteenth century and early seventeenth century must have convinced Tlaxcalteca farmers that cochineal was a risky business.

Conclusion The first hundred years or so after the Spanish conquest of Mexico was nothing short of transformative, the conjuncture of a millennial-scale climate event (the Colonial Mexican Pluvial), a biotic exchange of unparalleled significance (the Columbian Exchange), and a sociopolitical regime change (Spanish imperialism). For this ecological revolution, it would be easy to write a grim history of death and despair, of lost botanical riches, and of degradation and decline. I have, however, chosen to focus on interactions between biophysical rhythms, social practices, and economic markets, particularly the indigenous management of land and other resources for the production of local, regional, and global agricultural goods. Mortality and climate crises not only caused hardship, but forced the hand of some people and opened doors for others. The other analytical tack that I have taken is to shift our focus from Spanish to indigenous land use. The story we tell of landscape alteration in Tlaxcala— and elsewhere—should attempt to describe agrarian processes that speak to the majority (i.e., the 90–99.9 percent of cultivators who were indigenous) and not only a small minority of Spaniards. Spanish administrators, Spanish farmers, and Spanish biota all shaped the responses and outcomes of human reactions to climatic and demographic change, and yet it is easy to exaggerate Spanish influence and power in colonial history, especially during this early phase. Tlaxcalan cochineal circulated through global commodity chains made possible by imperial merchants and their commercial networks.85 Asian pigs were produced on indigenous farms in the expanded wetlands of the pluvial for regional markets that emerged with the growth of Spanish silver mining. We find litigation between native groups using Spanish courts. Two of the three great epidemics of the sixteenth century originated, it seems, from New World etiological agents responding to both global climate events and Spanish disturbance of the soil.

88

|

Chapter 2

Spanish sheep, pigs, and grains do not seem to have played such an important role in the sixteenth century, and yet, when they did, indigenous farmers often had control of them. Asian pigs, native insects, and indigenous land and water management systems often predominated over European ones. I do not wish to erase the European presence, but rather to show that natives and native biota often played leading roles in making the New World new. They did not inhabit a parallel universe but one where the Tlaxcalteca and other groups solved new and difficult socioecological problems in creative ways. Old World agriculture mattered but less because men of Iberian descent owned farms in the flatlands and more because—as we will see in the next chapter— Old World plants, animals, and tools fell quickly into the hands of indigenous farmers. What surprises in this analysis is that such creativity could be found in such dire times. Raising Asian pigs in native marshes proved a lucrative business. Cochineal production made peasants rich and threatened the social order, only to be overturned by some of the coldest decades in the Holocene. What counted in Tlaxcala, as in Teotihuacán, was that natives maintained an active, dynamic, and innovative responsiveness to the changing social ecology that confronted them.

CHAPTER 3

A Drunken Landscape Pulque, Mule Trains, and the New Wastelands

U

ntil the middle of the twentieth century, pulque was still king among the inebriants of central Mexico.1 It was the most popular intoxicant of pre-Hispanic Mexico and became consumed in ever-greater quantities in colonial times. It is produced from the sap (neuctli in Nahuatl, aguamiel in Spanish) extracted from the maguey pulquero, a class of succulents in the agave family of which the most important species was Agave salmiana (figure 10).2 The geographic extent of this plant is roughly coterminous with the central Mexican settlement zone (see map 4). Per capita colonial consumption has been estimated at an astounding 785 liters per year.3 The maguey was domesticated in ancient Mexico and has been integrated into local agrosystems for thousands of years. Shortly after the Conquest, Friar Toribio Motolinía noted that “the entire land is full of these maguey.”4 He characterized the plant as versatile and noble, like iron because “from it are made and extracted so many things.”5 Not only was the sap used to produce pulque but was consumed in the raw (nonfermented) by all ages. Mexicans ate the roasted leaves (called mexcalli), which were also sweet. Sometimes, the leaves were stuffed with meat and slow roasted, a dish called barbacoa in modern Mexico. The leaves were sometimes dried and then processed for fiber, which was then used for paper or to spin into thread for cloth, rope, and shoes. Many early colonial maps were produced on paper made with maguey fibers. The thorns that line the edges of the leaves (pencas) could be used as nails or needles. Dried

F I G U R E 1 0 Mature maguey pulquero (Agave salmiana). The agave’s spike— as seen above— indicates that the plant will live for only a few more weeks and its sap will not be collected. Photo by author, March 2005.

A Drunken Landscape

|

91

leaves were used for cooking fuel or for green compost. The great spike, reaching ten to twenty feet high, made excellent timbers for building construction. Thus, while the maguey was deeply integrated into the fabric of everyday life (and agrosystems), it was not always used—indeed, was often not used—to produce pulque. Indeed, pre-Hispanic governments strictly regulated where and when pulque could be drunk. The Spanish conquest, however, initiated a growth of pulque consumption and production that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, led to a radical shift in the place of the maguey in the economy, ecology, and culture of Mexico. Crown-authorized pulque trade began in and around Mexico City by the late 1580s and continually expanded afterward.6 In the seventeenth century, the colonial government—fiscally squeezed in difficult times—saw a fiscal upside to pulque and eased restrictions on its consumption even further. Aided by climate conditions, viceregal tax reforms, and market incentives, production soared. By the end of the seventeenth century, the royal treasury profited greatly from pulque, with annual tax receipts equal to the Indian tribute or the sales tax (alcabala).7 In the province of Tlaxcala, a royal decree of 1793 declared that pulque was “the only industry with which [the natives] have sustained and maintained themselves.”8 Despite pulque’s popularity, its centrality to the viceroyalty’s fiscal solvency, and its role in creating personal fortunes in colonial Mexico, colonial authorities despised and railed against it. Officials highlighted its role in exacerbating social ills and condemned pulque cantinas (known as pulquerías) as places of vice that served only to debase the lower orders. During the epidemic of 1635, for instance, New Spain’s Viceroy Cerralbo wrote to the king of Spain, identifying the cause of sickness among the natives to be “the great injury that the pulque drink does to them.”9 Negative portrayals of the liquor abounded, almost always as a means to point out the weakness and failings of the popular classes. Yet drinking pulque was common not only among indigenous peoples and the plebian classes. It attracted a following among Spaniards and creoles, who enjoyed a drink of this slightly slimy, sour-tasting beverage. This association was often made by foreign visitors, such as the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, he noted that even though pulque’s “fetid” aroma made it hard to swallow for the newly initiated, it had won over many Spaniards who came to “prefer pulque to every other liquor.”10 As early as the 1690s, another foreigner, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Carreri, documented the taste preference, claiming that “some Spaniards drink as much

92

|

Chapter 3

[pulque] as the indios.”11 The association between pulque and Mexican culture was well established by the wars of independence. A late-colonial image shows Mayahuel and the Virgen de los Remedios—two female spiritual entities— rising from the heart of the maguey.12 By the mid-nineteenth century, the drink had attained a nationalistic overtone. José Agustín Arrieta painted soldiers in a cantina, surrounded by women who prepared food and served pulque. All persons in the scene were depicted with fair skin.13 The binding and celebration of an indigenous past with a Mexican national culture was put on canvas by José Obregón in 1869 in his indianesque painting The Discovery of Pulque.14 In this chapter, I argue that this thriving liquor market produced more than the social ills about which some of the Mexican elite complained. Rural pulque production transformed the central Mexican countryside, triggering environmental impacts that in many places dwarfed the biological revolution set off by the arrival of Spaniards in the New World. Pulque’s rise made sense in the last few (very cold) decades of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial. Yet, during the Late Maunder Minimum climate extreme from the mid-1680s until the 1710s (with an unmatched extreme between 1696 and 1705), the new agrosystem in which the maguey starred acted as a catalyst for soil movements of an unprecedented scale. Important environmental risks accompanied the land-use systems for cultivating the maguey. Even though central Mexican farmers have used and manipulated several species of agave for more than nine thousand years, maguey cultivation in colonial Mexico was radically different from what preceded it. A large body of evidence points to the rapid expansion of sloping terraces during the seventeenth century, planted almost exclusively with maguey, a field system known as metepantli. This was a novel and risky strategy. Planting hillside sloping terraces with maguey started to gain popularity at the beginning of the seventeenth century when pulque markets began to expand rapidly, but reached its apex in Tlaxcalteca fields only after 1668. The geophysics, biology, and energetics of the new agroecosystem diverged entirely from so-called traditional indigenous peasant agriculture. The new ecology performed poorly and lacked resilience in times of stress. While the evidence presented in this chapter comes exclusively from Tlaxcala, it is worth pointing out that the maguey pulquero dominated the Teotihuacán Valley as it did the Zahuapan Valley. Indeed, the geographic and economic dominance of maguey across the Teotihuacán Valley likely exceeded that of Tlaxcala. Major asientos de pulque (monopolies to market pulque in defined geographic regions) were located in the valley, specifically at Otumba,

A Drunken Landscape

|

93

Teotihuacán, Nexquipayac, Tecama, Xometla, Atlatongo, and Ixtlahuacan. Most importantly, the region from Otumba (upper Teotihuacán Valley) to Apam (outside of the valley, between Otumba and Tlaxcala) was, arguably, the most important pulque-producing region in all of New Spain, undeniably so if we consider the delivery of pulque to Mexico City.15 The broad argument presented below thus applies equally to both regions and, more generally, to the entire central Mexican pulque region.

The Maguey in Early Colonial Society Before discussing the new place of the maguey within mid-seventeenth-century Tlaxcalan society and ecology, it is first necessary to establish the early colonial baseline. Agave cultivation in Mexico dates back to at least six thousand years before the present.16 Species grew readily in central Mexican soils, growing best at elevations between eighteen hundred and three thousand meters, and living between seven and twenty-five years.17 In deep organic soils with substantial nutrient stores, the plant matures earlier and dies at a younger age than when grown in thin, nutrient-deprived, and rocky soils. It is tolerant of frost—even severe frost—and withstands bouts of hail, drought, and even snowfall. A collection of forty-one indigenous wills from southern Tlaxcala (1572– 98) demonstrates that farmers, at this time, grew maguey close to their homes. These primary habitational parcels (also used for cultivation) were called callalli, “house-land.” Each family also possessed numerous non-callalli plots that were located at some distance from the house. In almost all cases before 1590, farmers had planted maguey in the callalli plot or on newly purchased land that had once been the callalli of another family. Only after 1590 did maguey cultivation spread out from the callalli parcel, a subject taken up in more detail below.18 Without beasts of burden, pre-Columbian farmers lived close to their fields, in a dispersed homestead arrangement, with cultivated land separating one house from another.19 The callalli plots that surrounded the home supplied the everyday needs of the household, such as fuelwood, medicine, herbs, fruit and berries, and even provisions for house chores, like cleaning, household repairs, and even clothing fixes. The callalli parcels possessed excellent land because they received the greatest investment of labor and soil amendments such as night soil, compost, ash from the heart, and other household “refuse.” Fertile soils and the proximity of household labor meant that the callalli parcel focused

94

|

Chapter 3

on vegetable and fruit crops and likely contained only small maize plots, a crop that was planted in the supplementary eccentric parcels. In the cases where testators declared the dimensions of their plots, the callalli varied in size from 0.1 hectares to 0.8 hectares, with an average of 0.4 hectares.20 Thus, they were small, intensively cultivated, and frequently harvested. A large number of uses—in fact, most human uses of the maguey—could occur simultaneously throughout the life span of the plant, making its incorporation into the house-garden plot quite rational. The consumption of mexcalli and the extraction of fibers from leaves could both occur periodically when the plant had large and healthy leaves. Particularly, the use of maguey fiber for clothing and rope was a frequent and labor-intensive occupation for many women, especially in pre-Conquest Tlaxcala when a Mexica embargo had hindered the import of cotton (and other supplies), which stimulated the cultivation of maguey for textiles. This complemented the subsequent use of the spike for lumber, which could occur at the end of the plant’s life, provided that some leaves remained. Some uses, however, conflicted with others, namely the collection of aguamiel—for consumption raw or fermented as pulque. When aguamiel was sought, most leaves needed to be left untouched. Years would then pass with little benefit to the farmer other than the future consumption of aguamiel, seven to twenty-five years later. Biophysically, it also made sense to have the maguey in the callalli plot. Being able to watch over the maguey also agreed with the maguey’s physiology. Despite its rugged appearance, the plant requires frequent care. It is, after all, a domesticated plant in which the great efflorescence—which rises from the heart of the plant a few months before its demise, with a spike about twenty centimeters in diameter and four or five meters high—produces sterile seeds. To fuel the rise of this impressive spike, the plant transfers the liquid stored in leaves to the new growth, a process that depletes and desiccates the leaves and permits the spike to flower and seed. A strong and well-kept parent plant of Agave salmiana has broad leaves, reaching a meter or more in length, that spread concentrically from the plant’s “heart,” resulting in plants with a diameter of two or three meters and a height slightly less than the diameter. When cared for, they are truly a spectacular sight. If the plant does not have any offsets feeding from the many shallow roots, it withers and dies. Similarly, if the plant has too many offsets that have not been removed from the parent plant’s roots and growing medium, the offsets deplete the stores of water and nutrients of the basal rosette and drain the parent plant’s vitality. Eventually,

A Drunken Landscape

|

95

in such competition, both offsets and parent plants weaken and die out, often replaced by other grasses, shrubs, and trees.21 Given these core household functions of the maguey, and its intensive care, it made sense that early colonial maguey followed pre-Hispanic patterns. In these ecological contexts—combined with the political culture of restrained consumption—maguey were rarely used for pulque. Even in the 1580s, forty years after Friar Motolinía, Diego Muñoz Camargo dedicated more than a page to the maguey plant in his Descripción but never once mentioned metepantli or pulque.22 Instead, the diverse uses made it indispensable to early colonial lives and kept the maguey close to home, on the best and probably the flattest land, making use of the proximity of the entire household’s labor to care for the plants.

Early Commodification of Pulque As geographer Georgina Endfield has argued, “experience and awareness of climatic variability fueled a variety of adaptive strategies, innovation, and agrarian experimentation.”23 Given the demise of the Tlaxcalan cochineal industry, which began to disintegrate by the 1590s and had virtually disappeared by the 1620s, and given an era in which disease outbreaks with high rates of mortality occurred almost every other year, along with destructive frosts and snowfalls, it must have seemed prudent to farmers to invest in maguey, a less fickle and more frost-resistant cash crop. There were other factors, of course, especially market signals from an increasingly unregulated trade and rising demand in urban centers, haciendas, and obrajes (textile factories). As farmers turned away from cochineal, they sought new cash crops to pay tribute and buy needed household supplies and, moreover, no longer felt bound to the house-garden system. While house gardens accommodated the initial surge in pulque demand, peasant Tlaxcalteca wills show that shortly afterward farmers shifted maguey production to non-callalli plots. Of the five land purchases, all were maguey land (or newly planted with maguey) and four were non-callalli plots. Only one of those purchased plots had metepantli, and significantly, when farmers seeded new land they did so in the orchard arrangement previously used in house gardens. If we widen the focus to include not only recently purchased plots but also all instances in which farmers identified the existence of new maguey plantings, the wills show that in all but one

96

|

Chapter 3

instance, maguey expansion occurred within orchards in non-callalli land. This fact demonstrates a trend toward cultivating maguey in lands located farther away from the house complex, that is, in less fertile, more sloped, outlying parcels that demanded greater labor inputs. Thus, the fall of the cochineal industry in Tlaxcala permitted a new way of organizing land and labor in the countryside, one in which maguey production quickly consolidated its position as the dominant cash crop. Production in Tlaxcala grew simultaneously with rising demand. The wills also show how farmers responded to increasing demand. Sorting the wills into two groups—before and after 1590—reveals that testators had planted more parcels with maguey near the end of their lives. Of those wills written before 1590, 7 percent of land parcels had maguey, while after 1590, the proportion rose to 16 percent. The same data further reveal that testators relied increasingly on neuctli extraction to pay for postmortem Catholic masses or to resolve outstanding debts. Before 1590 there was only one such instance; after, there were fourteen. While indigenous wills give few details about cultivation systems, on the whole they suggest maguey cultivation expanded by conservative means, with the essential orchard (meyotoc) format being preserved. The wills mention only six instances where indigenous farmers planted maguey in the metepantli form, and four of them occurred in the intensely cultivated callalli. In the other thirtysix examples, testators used the phrase “meyotoc,” meaning literally “a place full of (or covered by) maguey.” This is to say that farmers expanded maguey production in monocropped perennial orchards, or plantations, and not by integrating them with annuals such as maize, chilies, wheat, or, as would become normal by the late seventeenth century, barley. This is significant because, in the perennial garden system, farmers did not break up and cultivate the spaces between plants. While yields would surely be lower in orchard-style fields—because (as seen above) metepantli accumulate nutrients and water stores beneath the roots of maguey, and furthermore, because weeds would reduce the quantity of soil nutrients available to maguey—the system would nevertheless protect hillside soils from erosive pluvial forces. In sum, the wills show that in the last decade of the sixteenth century maguey production was rising, that such production was increasingly market oriented, and that a conservative orchard system accommodated rising demand until at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. The discontinuation of maguey for purposes other than pulque contributed to its relocation to the geographic periphery. Other forces in the seventeenth century, beyond the worsening weather and improving urban pulque markets,

A Drunken Landscape

|

97

contributed to the development of eccentric metepantli. Importantly, the colonial government’s resettlement program achieved greater success in the first decade of the seventeenth century. This resulted in greater population density of callalli parcels and diminished the available land for eccentric parcels in the immediate surroundings. Consequently, distances between the house and eccentric parcels increased. Other factors might have also contributed to settlement density—factors that intensified throughout the seventeenth century, such as market integration and household dependencies on products purchased in town markets. By 1749, the Tlaxcalan Cabildo stated clearly that “natives” had resettled in communities and abandoned their lands and homes in the “hills and ravines.” The new centralized settlements reinforced and intensified a center/ periphery, or infield/outfield, pattern of land use in which distant plots held less economic value than central ones because labor costs rose as one traveled farther from the settlement.24 The integration of sheep into the local agrosystem made maguey fiber largely redundant and enabled maguey cultivation to relocate to outlying fields because women no longer needed frequent access to the plants for fiber.25 Tlaxcala’s pre-Conquest trade embargo (which restricted cotton imports) ended abruptly after the defeat of the Mexica in Tenochtitlán, but cotton remained expensive. The Tlaxcalteca turned to sheep wool to fill their need for clothing manufacture. Even lexicographically, wool edged out maguey and cotton fiber. Nahuatl speakers called sheep and cotton fiber by the same name (ichcatl), a word that itself derived from the Nahuatl word for maguey thread (ichtli).26 Marginalization of the maguey thus proceeded on a number of fronts: spatially (away from peasant residences), socially (from women to men), and even linguistically (as seen immediately above). At the same time, however, the maguey assumed a highly specialized economic role within the Tlaxcaltecatl household economy.

The Asiento de Pulque Despite the emergence of maguey as a cash crop located in outlying fields, until the advent of a new transportation and marketing system in 1668, families continued to market their own pulque, and as a consequence production likely remained moderate. Husbands looked after the fields and fermented the neuctli, and wives rushed the product to market before it spoiled (about five days after the neuctli was extracted).27 In the familial marketing system, fields and

98

|

Chapter 3

markets remained by necessity in close proximity, probably within ten to fifteen kilometers.28 A small minority of farmers took their product to market with mules, but most walked it to market. According to anthropologist Ross Hassig’s calculations, professional porters (tlamamah) carried about twenty-three kilograms for twenty-one to twenty-eight kilometers per day.29 In this scenario, family members would likely carry less weight and travel far shorter distances, especially given that most who carried their pulque to market were non-adult males who needed enough time to sell their goods, buy new products, and return home in the same day. Marketing liquids within this familial system restricted pulque output and curbed ambitions to seed additional land with maguey. After 1668, marketing pulque congealed into an efficient and formalized system that in Tlaxcala and the city of Puebla (to the south) separated marketing and production, a situation that enabled pulque producers from much farther away to participate. In 1668, seeking to increase tax revenue and to profit from the growing trade in pulque, the colonial government established the asiento de pulque in Mexico City and shortly after another in the region of Puebla, Tlaxcala, and Cholula, and yet another in Oaxaca.30 The asentista (or tax farmer) paid a large, flat rate of tens of thousands of pesos for the exclusive right to collect the taxes on pulque sales and even maguey plants. The more tax he collected, the greater he profited. The huge payments that the asentista made to the Crown treasury indebted him to the colony’s wealthy merchants, which in turn gave the asentista a vested interest in seeing the pulque industry thrive and in ensuring that this commodity moved through official markets where it could be effectively controlled and taxed. The amounts collected by the asentista will be explored below when I estimate the increase of pulque production and consumption in Tlaxcala after the installation of the asiento in Puebla. One method to facilitate and control the trade was the creation of a muletrain system that stretched into the countryside and picked up pulque. A report from 1772–73 clarified the method used in the late colonial era, which was probably quite similar to that a century earlier.31 Pulque-filled sheepskin sacks were cleaned with an acid wash and then made impermeable by applying numerous coats of fat to it. The sacks were then loaded on mules and rushed to market without any loss of time and as delicately as possible, especially when faced

with large distances between ranch and market. They come from as far away as twenty-five leagues to Mexico City. They travel all night. . . . Even with these

measures, losses cannot be avoided; some pulque ferments, froths, and spews out

A Drunken Landscape

|

99

of the bags, which must be loosened so as to expel a little more. For this reason

and because the muleteers furtively drink or sell some to travelers en route, the muleteers believe it necessary to top up the bags with water so as not to call attention to the losses when the bags are weighed and measured on arrival.32

While the details of transport seem relatively clear, the precise modus operandi of the transport industry is not, and is still more obscure with regard to macehualli (non-elite farmers with land) production. In Tlaxcala the post-familial pulque industry divided into three distinct social sectors: a tax-free category of “extractorowners of maguey,” and two distinct taxable classes, the “transporters” and the “pulque-traders.”33 The pulque traders operated the business end of the new system, contracting and paying farmers for their product, while the “transporters” brought the product to towns and cities by mule trains. This division of labor indicates very clearly that farmers no longer transported or marketed their pulque. Undoubtedly, farmers continued to transport some pulque on their own backs and by contraband methods. Yet by 1670 a substantial quantity of pulque was already moved by large, organized loads, not by individual farmers.34 In a case from southern Tlaxcala, locals fought over access to roads and the damage done by specialized mule trains that moved pulque and lumber into Puebla, and it is even suggested that the local indigenous townspeople helped to operate the mule trains.35 Mules revolutionized the pulque industry by reducing transportation costs and connecting distant lands to urban markets. The fast rate of putrefaction demanded that pulque move quickly from field to market. Farmers had no control over how much or when neuctli flowed. Based on the different carrying capacities outlined above, human porters could carry at most one-half of the mule’s load and, in most cases, just one-third to one-quarter. The benefits of mule labor increased substantially for three reasons. First, a single muleteer led a team of mules to market, not just one or two animals, and thus the load transported with the labor of a single person was tens of times greater than that of a human porter. Second, mules traveled longer hours than humans and thus across much greater distances. Lastly and perhaps more importantly, mules did not compete with humans for food sources. Farmers could grow hardy grains that required few nutrients (such as barley) between rows of maguey, which could then be fed to draught animals and other livestock, leaving the nitrogendemanding maize to grow on land that had sources of fertilizer nearby, such as in ravine, riverine, and floodplain environments. Of course, feeding livestock cultivated feed (instead of pasturage) meant that more land had to be cultivated.

100

|

Chapter 3

Indeed, barley was fed not only to mules but to oxen that would plough the fields (and build metepantli, as seen below) and also to sheep and pigs. Thus, the energy requirements for these transportation and agrarian systems demanded extensive tracts of land and substantial investments of energy. Without the mules and oxen, pulque consumption would have been more local, more expensive, and more limited in scope and quantity. In 1688 the Crown ordered that traders transport pulque no more than five leagues, or about twenty-one kilometers.36 According to Vaclav Smil, a mule traveling one meter per second over eight hours moved twenty-six kilometers per day.37 Yet the scientific paper from 1772–73 quoted above notes that mule trains customarily moved all night and in many cases traveled as many as twentyfive leagues (100–140 km). Indeed, this point had been made much earlier by the Duke of Alburquerque in 1709 and even before that in 1680. The decree issued by the Duke of Alburquerque repeated the 1680 Royal Provision, saying: Because it is common to move [pulque] by night, the mules that tire are left by the road and when those who transport the goods return they often discover

that the . . . local authorities have confiscated the animals and in return demand excessive quantities of money; if not given such sums, they sell or keep the ani-

mals. . . . In order to avoid these problems, the Real Provisión was issued, but regardless of the origin of this law, such excesses have not yet been remedied.38

Thus, from 1680 onward, the Crown recognized the crucial role played by mules in the pulque trade and set out rules to protect muleteers and their livestock. The efficacy of laws, and in particular the five-league law, remains uncertain. Virtually everyone except consumers benefited from circumventing such laws, and thus twenty-one kilometers likely indicated the minimal zone of influence of a market as defined within the confines of the formalized mule-train system. Map 5 shows the pulque marketing system (asiento) in Mexico, while map 15 shows the multiple marketing sites in Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán. Legally, Tlaxcala City incorporated almost the entire Zahuapan River basin except the towns of Tlaxco (to the north) and Huamantla (to the east), while the city of Puebla could draw from as far north as San Bernardino Contlan and even Santa Cruz. In reality, however, pulque could have arrived to the city of Puebla from anywhere in Tlaxcala. Moreover, it is not unthinkable that Tlaxcala sent pulque to Mexico City. The area of Apam, just west of Tlaxcala’s borders, sent large quantities of pulque to Mexico City.39

A Drunken Landscape

|

101

MAP 15 Pulque markets and their regional supply zones in Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán. The map shows sightlines and distances between the geographic centers of Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán and the locations of pulque asientos. The province of Tlaxcala controlled its own pulque marketing, resulting in a dearth of official pulque asientos there and, thereby, a false perception of a relatively limited number of pulque markets available to that province. Much pulque was also bought and sold outside of the official asiento system.

Soaring Production of Pulque The creation of the asiento in 1668 clearly invigorated the pulque trade and maguey production. Official records of the Crown’s tax revenue from the Puebla asiento show annual payments of about twenty-one thousand pesos in 1668.40 This appears to have held quite steady until 1692.41 José Hernández estimates that consumption reached about 310,000 liters annually, but this calculation

102

|

Chapter 3

errs by overlooking the legal revenue not reported by the asentista. Hernández’s estimate includes only the Crown’s tax revenue. The asentista took a large share of the revenue to pay expenses and make a profit. Moreover, given the regular annual consumption of pulque per adult (approximately 785 L) and the population of the city of Puebla in 1675 (at least 68,000), annual consumption there should equal closer to 53 million liters, 172 times the amount suggested by Hernández. An official record from 1670 shows that 142 cargas (loads) of pulque arrived in the city of Puebla from Tlaxcala over a two-day period. With each load equivalent to about 136 liters,42 the 1670 document indicates that slightly less than 10,000 liters moved from Tlaxcala into the city of Puebla every day, which extrapolates to more than 3.5 million liters each year. This amount includes only legal (taxed) loads of pulque blanco, which for reasons set out below represent only about one-half of total exports. Thus, one can project that about 20,000 liters of pulque moved into Puebla from Tlaxcala each day, about 7 million liters annually, for which about 1,400 hectares of land (annually) and about three hundred mules (daily) were dedicated. If Pueblans consumed 53 million liters annually, then these tax receipts suggest that Tlaxcala supplied about 13  percent of this market, which makes sense given the close proximity of many other potential suppliers from non-Tlaxcalan indigenous towns near Puebla. After the uprisings of the 1680s, Tlaxcala paid a flat annual rate of 1,200 pesos to the Puebla asentista. This equates to only 6 percent of royal revenue for the asiento de pulque of Puebla, just half of what the 1670 tax revenues indicate. Once again, Tlaxcala had struck quite a good deal with the Crown, even though it complained bitterly about this imposition and tried to reduce or eliminate it.43 With this flat rate, Tlaxcala could increase sales to Puebla without any financial penalty, giving them a competitive advantage in the Pueblan market. With such incentives, it is not surprising that pulque production skyrocketed. The Puebla asentista capitán don Gabriel de Inchaurriqui reported in 1692: In the twenty years since the pulque asiento began, one cannot ponder how

the number of maguey has increased. . . . Many indios who before seeded their

little parcels of land with maize, find better profits and business in maguey and have [since] occupied themselves with them [to such a degree that] they

do not have nor apply themselves to any other labor and crop other than . . .

A Drunken Landscape

|

103

maguey, neglecting almost completely to cultivate in the said lands maize and other seeds.44

It is possible to estimate the amount of land needed to produce enough neuctli for both direct consumption and pulque. Table 1 shows the evolution of Tlaxcala’s population and that of the city of Puebla.45 The next step is to take these population figures and calculate the amount of land needed to produce the neuctli and pulque consumed by colonial families. Given this low population density, the amount of land required for neuctli and pulque in Tlaxcala was small compared to the total area available for indigenous cultivation. The area cultivated with maguey is shown in table 2, averaging 6,300 hectares, or roughly 5 percent of arable land (excluding that belonging to Spanish estates). In absolute terms, 5 percent is hardly significant, but then again, I estimate that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 80–87  percent of Tlaxcalteca land remained unused or underused. Thus, 5 percent of total

TABLE 1 Population estimates of Tlaxcala and the city of Puebla. Year

Pop. Prov. Tlaxcalaa

Pop. City of Pueblab

Total Pulque Consumersc

1525 1550 1575 1600 1625 1650 1675 1700 1725 1750 1775 1800

250,000 235,000 145,000 71,000 55,000 62,000 69,000 60,000 72,000 65,000 72,000 67,000

0 2,500 7,000 15,000 26,000 45,000 68,000 61,000 79,000 50,000 50,000 60,000

250,000 237,500 152,000 86,000 81,000 107,000 137,000 121,000 151,000 115,000 122,000 127,000

a Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, 138–48; Trautmann, Transformaciones, anexos 13.2.1 and 13.2.2. b Garavaglia and Grosso, “Región de Puebla/Tlaxcala,” 560–62; Gerhard, Guide to the Historical Geography, 220– 23; Hoekstra, Two Worlds Merging, 73; Vollmer, “Evolución cuantitativa.” c I estimate two pulque consumers per family of four.

104

|

Chapter 3

TABLE 2 Area cultivated with maguey.

Year

Total Popa

Pulque Consumersb

Pulque Consumption (L/yr)c

Land in Maguey (ha)d

Land for Neuctli (ha)e

Total Land in Maguey (ha)

1525 1550 1575 1600 1625 1650 1675 1700 1725 1750 1775 1800

250,000 237,500 152,000 86,000 78,000 103,000 133,000 117,000 145,000 111,000 103,000 112,000

125,000 118,750 76,000 43,000 39,000 51,500 66,500 58,500 72,500 55,500 51,500 56,000

150 250 350 450 550 650 750 785 785 785 785 785

1,974 3,125 2,800 2,037 2,258 3,524 5,250 4,834 5,991 4,586 4,256 4,627

7,204 6,772 4,178 2,046 1,498 1,671 1,873 1,614 1,902 1,758 1,527 1,498

9,178 9,897 6,978 4,083 3,756 5,195 7,123 6,448 7,893 6,344 5,783 6,126

Note: An area planted exclusively in maguey produces about 9,500 liters of neuctli per year. Parsons and Parsons, Maguey Utilization, 336. a Includes the population of Tlaxcala and the city of Puebla. b A pulque consumer is defined as any adult. c I assume a gradual increase of consumption. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 67. d The average productivity of land planted exclusively in maguey is 9,500 L/ha. Parsons and Parsons, Maguey Utilization, 336. e Evans, “Productivity of Maguey Terrace Agriculture,” 126.

arable Tlaxcalteca land is much more important than at first glance. Because a standard family of five required about 1.1 hectares of land to subsist (an area that accounts for crop rotation and fallowing), the total Tlaxcalteca population required an average of about 13,000 hectares for maize and other grains during the seventeenth century. This means that if farmers planted maguey in 6,300 hectares, this crop took up roughly one-third of all indigenous land (cultivated or fallow) by 1675, whereas in 1525 it amounted to no more than one-seventh. Put another way, although the Tlaxcalan population fell to just one-sixth of its pre-Conquest total of three hundred thousand, the area of land planted in maguey still covered more than half of its original area (of course, in a new field arrangement). Looked at from this perspective, maguey cultivation stands out as a critical component of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century agrosystem in Tlaxcala and a potential cause of the Zahuapan River’s changing behavior.

A Drunken Landscape

|

105

In Tlaxcala, the pulque industry had become so central to peasant livelihoods during the seventeenth century that Tlaxcalteca maguey farmers staged violent protests to ensure they did not pay taxes on their maguey fields (which the asentista sought). The asentista along with the Crown’s “pulque judge” arrived in Tlaxcala in 1670 to get the Cabildo to pay their tax arrears, arguing that not only should pulque sales be taxed but also the plants themselves. The Cabildo based its claim (as it had numerous times in the past regarding other disputes over tribute and taxation) on the cédulas (royal orders) issued by Charles I, who ruled from 1516 to 1556 and had exempted Tlaxcala from tax payments (even though the province had paid various head taxes since the sixteenth century).46 Once again, the indigenous Cabildo located their cédulas and formulated a petition against the current measures. Regardless, the pulque judge read the viceregal order and proceeded on the following day to collect consumption taxes in the Tlaxcala market. Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, the author of a famous annals series and a member of the Tlaxcala Cabildo, took part in the diplomatic mission to reverse the taxes, going first to Puebla and then to the viceregal court in Mexico City to plead their case. Don Juan Buenaventura claimed that the province was filled with consternation over the pulque tax: “all over Tlaxcala, in the entire province, it was their worry—the poor, those who care for maguey and even those who do not but who pay for it [pulque].”47 The viceroy heard their case, and after five months of deliberation decided in favor of Tlaxcala, ordering that only consumers would be taxed and producers would not pay tax on the maguey in their fields. This solution quelled public anger, suggesting that producers (not consumers) led the original upheaval. As will be shown below, pilli such as don Juan Buenaventura were beginning to make large investments in maguey land at this time. Taxes on maguey plants would have proved prohibitive to further investments, especially because new plantations took ten to twelve years before producing sap, so that taxes would accumulate before farmers earned a return on their investment. When the pulque judge tried once again in 1671 to impose the plant tax, consternation turned to violent protest. As don Juan declared, the mob “was going to kill the pulque judge because maguey were going to be taxed.” At this point Buenaventura ceased to identify with the masses and allied himself with Mexican officials. He claimed that he and other public officials had done all they could do; the officials “had taken all the privilegios, cédulas—every document [relative to the issue]—they showed it all, spent a month before coming back.” Yet “the masses did not accept this, roused themselves and came to

106

|

Chapter 3

confront us, yelling loudly.”48 Popular protest (fueled by the support of the new “grassroots” ruling class) spread from pulque taxes to tribute in general as the Tlaxcalteca demanded a cut in the head tax and increased taxation of the rural estates. Widespread uprisings continued in 1671–72, prompting Buenaventura to describe the situation as “an actual war . . . in the palace.” Violence erupted again in 1680 over the pulque issue when the viceregal government decided to reinforce the taxes on maguey plants.49 On April 17, 1680, farmers from San Bernardino Contlan held out a clay pot of pulque before authorities and told the latter that if the tax was enforced, there would be trouble. And there was: maguey farmers attacked and stoned officials, causing the latter to take shelter in the church for eight days. Sword-wielding Spaniards arrived from all over Tlaxcala to guard the church. The popular uprisings and the Cabildo’s politicking paid off, and Tlaxcalteca maguey farmers kept their exemption. The Crown later extended the exemption in 1716 to all products bought and sold within Tlaxcalan markets.50 The pulque tax exemption resurfaced again in 1793, at which time the Crown reaffirmed Tlaxcala’s exemption for not only indios but Spaniards and castas (ethnic groups beyond indio, español, and negro) residing in the province.51 Ultimately, the hard-fought battle against taxation gave Tlaxcala a competitive advantage in the pulque industry and invigorated regional production. On the other hand, the quick and effective response of Tlaxcalteca maguey farmers to taxation suggests that even before the founding of the asiento and the associated reorganization of pulque transport and marketing, Tlaxcalteca peasants had staked their future on pulque.

Macehualli and Altepetl Pulque Production By the end of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Tlaxcalteca farmers considered maguey cultivation absolutely critical to their livelihoods. The industry grew steadily from the 1590s until 1668, and with the creation of the Puebla asiento in 1668, maguey plantations soon dominated the rural landscape. The transition to pulque was so thorough and fast-paced that witnesses, remembering the process in 1743, described it occurring in a single night! In 1663, witnesses declared hardworking indigenous cochineal producers—fed up with high taxes and unfair treatment from administrators—led a mass eradication of nopal gardens (on which cochineal was seeded) and replanted them with maguey.

A Drunken Landscape

|

107

Needless to say, the story is apocryphal; the transition could not have occurred in one night and one doubts that local farmers made such an important economic decision as a collective of individual producers. In fact, the witnesses—all elite Spaniards with little knowledge of the agrarian history of local indigenous farmers—overlooked the finer details in search of an overarching narrative, one that could explain the economic and demographic decline that worried residents of the Puebla-Tlaxcala region in the eighteenth century. For them, the fields of maguey reflected not only an economic decline from the riches of cochineal, but cultural degeneration as well. The men looked despairingly around them, imagining a drunken landscape of maguey, “which [the indios] maintain in a succulent condition, being the source of their drunken binges.”52 Contrary to popular opinion, both now and then, the transition to pulque involved a lifetime of hard work, economic investment, and the designing and executing of a new ecology. Indigenous townspeople appear to have combined grain production, shepherding, and maguey in hillside metepantli, that is, sloping terraces seeded with maguey (see figures 11 and 12). Farmers constructed sloping terraces by digging shallow trenches and mounding the excavated earth into rows (called berms) within which they planted perennials, in this case maguey. The berms act as hillside check dams and accumulate soils at and upslope from them. The accumulated soils change soil humidity and water dynamics on hillslopes by storing more water at greater depths, thereby increasing the likelihood that crops will survive midsummer droughts. Farmers walked the berms, watching for maguey entering the final stage of their life. Once identified, the farmer returned twice daily for a period of one to two months to cut, dig, scrape, and collect the sap from maguey, then transporting it to the “brewery” (octlaliloyan in Nahuatl, or tinacal in Spanish) where the pulque fermented.53 After the maguey has expired, farmers excise the roots of the dead plant from the berm—an arduous and time-consuming task—and then reseed the void with offsets. Failure to reseed risks losing soil to precipitation and enlarging spaces where the maguey had been. Nutrient accumulation at the berm benefited the pulque farmer by increasing yields per plant and by shortening the life cycle of the plant, which also increased overall field production. Worse, if left unchecked, the hillslope devolves to its pre-terraced slope gradient, meaning that extremely high rates of erosion occur (see figure 13).54 Riskiest of all was the creation of new metepantli. Studies show that the season’s first rainfall can completely wash away newly constructed terraces.55

FIGURE 11 Sloping terraces with maguey (metepantli), central Tlaxcala. Photo by Dean Snow, winter 1964– 65.

F I G U R E 1 2 Sloping terraces with maguey (metepantli) on barren hillslope in central Tlaxcala. Photo by Dean Snow, winter 1964– 65.

A Drunken Landscape

|

109

FIGURE 13 Deteriorating metepantli on Tezoyotepec Hill. Photo by author, June 2007.

Maintaining soil fertility on terrace treads was an uphill battle. As William Sanders notes: Terrace maintenance is an arduous and never-ending task. Erosion is a constant threat. Although no detailed study was made, there seems to be a very close relationship between the condition of terraces and the distance from house

to land, population pressure, and degree of dependence of the landowner on agriculture for subsistence.56

Terrace treads and berms must be kept clear of competing plants. The shallow roots of the maguey force the plant to compete with other shallow-rooted plants that occupy the same space, such as the grasses that are jeopardizing the maguey in figure 13. Maguey will rob maize or other crops of nutrients within a 1.5–2.0 meter distance. That the maguey competes for surface nutrients is illustrated clearly by figure 11. The photograph reveals the extent to which farmers removed all other vegetation to maximize the maguey’s growth potential.

110

|

Chapter 3

Soil fertility maintenance involved clearing away competitor species, cleaning ditches of sediment. The health of hillslope soils depended on continual renewal of labor investments. While sloping terraces existed in central Mexico by the classical period (150– 600 CE) and certainly by the late post-classical era (1150–1521 CE), no reliable evidence confirms the presence of metepantli before the colonial era.57 Current archaeological methods cannot determine if sloping terraces were populated by monoculture maguey or had a mixed perennial arrangement on berms. In 2000, paleoethnobotanist Emily McClung de Tapia summarized recent archaeological findings on this subject and sought to emphasize “direct [physical] evidence available for agricultural systems” versus “anthropological models.”58 Differing from scholars such as William Sanders and Susan Evans, who postulate widespread use of metepantli, McClung reminds her readers that all relevant evidence of pre-Conquest maguey cultivation pertains only to house plots (callalli). No direct archaeological evidence exists for non-callalli sloping terraces with or without maguey.59 Even Sanders admits that such terraces were practically impossible to detect archaeologically.60 Tellingly, anthropologist Teresa Rojas Rabiela has only recently turned up the first and perhaps only early colonial image of a metepantli.61 Aleksander Borejsza, another expert on this subject who has conducted extensive fieldwork in Tlaxcala, failed to find evidence of the metepantli before the arrival of Spaniards, suggesting that “they became widespread only in the colonial period.”62 In any case, by the mid-seventeenth century, references to metepantli are everywhere in archival documents. In fact, a mixed farming system seems to have been used. Monoculture berm (cultivated with maguey) provided pulque to be sold for cash, while the sloping tread often provided animal feed (such as barley). Sheep and goats grazed around the deeper soils of the berm, which stored water and nutrients throughout the dry winter season.63 Communities such as Yauhquemecan and Contlan, located close to markets in Tlaxcala City and within one day by mule of the city of Puebla, benefited from close proximity to markets and a rather dense settlement pattern. In land located closer to major pulque markets, metepantli ribbed the hillsides and defined the limits of properties. In and around San Bernardino Contlan (the community held responsible for the pulque riots) and just to the north, San Salvador Tzompantzinco, the mixed metepantli agrosystem dominated.64 On the other side of the Zahuapan River, near Yauhquemecan, this same picture emerges during a tour of the boundaries of the Ahuehuetitlan parcel wherein metepantli established

A Drunken Landscape

|

111

the border on every side and corner of its perimeter except where the road lay.65 Within two thousand meters of the Ahuehuetitlan parcel (mentioned above), one could find the pueblos of Yauhquemecan, Ocotoxco, Calapan, Tlacuilocan, Atentzinco, Cuauhtelolpan, and Tochpan. That land was in short supply is evidenced by the numerous disputes between these communities and, moreover, between them and noble landowners. There is evidence from this region that farmers took advantage of growing pulque markets as early as 1641, but to meet growing demand for this production, they had little choice but to reinforce the metepantli and hold in nutrients and top soils. The correlation of sheep grazing and metepantli agriculture remained strong in Yauhquemecan, an area that had, in 1644, about eight hundred sheep.66 A beautiful map from 1777 of the hillside where Yauhquemecan was located shows a complex patchwork of land uses in which livestock movements and feeding habits were carefully managed and livestock walks, or paths, linked pastures and water sources. Maguey lay between the various pastures, indicating that livestock probably moved between and within metepantli before being corralled at night, which had been the law in Tlaxcala since the 1560s.67 The association of metepantli and sheep, however, appears much weaker in other areas. As shown by a 1694 list of agrarian capital (see below for further discussion), macehualli fields in the region near Apizaco (about ten kilometers from Yauhquemecan) supported both sheep and maguey in just over half the cases. Less than one-quarter of peasant farmers possessed sheep; far more common was a correlation between oxen and maguey. A remarkable document from 1694 strongly suggests that even in areas on the periphery of major pulque markets (twenty to twenty-five kilometers away from Tlaxcala City and twice that distance from Puebla), maguey dominated the landscape.68 In the wake of the disease outbreaks of 1692–94, the viceroy forced Tlaxcalan officials to collect tribute from indigenous communities, and where cash could not be found, ordered the appropriation and sale of agrarian capital such as land, livestock, grain, or maguey. Some community officials declared that “although many have died, they did not leave behind any belongings.” This repeated declaration is very difficult to believe, especially because officials from a few communities, such as those from San Cosme Xaloztoc, listed the property of twenty poor peasant families (where both parents had perished in the epidemic). Cabildo officials pressed communities to put forward at least some lands and agricultural capital that could be sold, which the Cabildo could use to demonstrate to viceregal authorities that they had made their best efforts. The weakest

112

|

Chapter 3

communities would likely bend under the Cabildo’s pressure first. Thus, the larger communities located closer to Tlaxcala City unilaterally declared that the dead had left nothing behind. For instance, the community of San Salvador Tzompantzinco (located about five kilometers east of San Bernardino Contlan) declared in 1694 that none of the dead owned land, despite the fact that many other contemporary documents indicate clearly that maguey were planted near the Amomoloc River and Marsh.69 The scenario proposed by Tzompantzinco officials is highly implausible, especially given that one of the town’s dead had worked as a builder of metepantli. Likely, the Cabildo’s 1694 declaration to viceregal authorities is an accounting of the most politically and economically expendable lands, the most distant parcels (from peasant homes) in the poorest and weakest communities. Nevertheless, the 1694 document provides unassailable evidence in support of a widespread and thoroughly developed maguey and pulque industry in indigenous peasant lands. One of the defunct peasant families (denoted clearly with nondescript names: Juan Domingo [father], María Pascuala [mother], and Juan [son, aged twelve]) reported by officials from Tzompantzinco “did not leave behind any belongings” other than a mule and ploughshare. Officials listed Juan Domingo’s occupation as the following: “he lived by making calles y canales,” evidently with his mule and ploughshare.70 Because colonial documentation regularly refers to metepantli as calles de magueyes, it is not surprising that similar documents describe the job of metepantli-maker as a maker of berms (i.e., calles) and ditches (canales or sanjas).71 More incontrovertibly, the 1694 document provides a more statistical basis for the widespread existence of metepantli in peasant communities. Leaders from towns located in the eastern sub-basin of the Zahuapan River (from Tetlan, Miztlan, Ocotitlan, and, most importantly, San Cosme Xaloztoc) were more forthright with their description of land and agrarian capital left behind by the deceased. Undoubtedly, officials would have been none too eager to disclose the abandoned parcels. Given the corrupt politics of the time, they likely concealed the best land and agrarian capital for their own benefit and provided the Cabildo with a list of marginal lands. The plots they disclosed were marginal not only to the community, but also to the entire pulque marketing system. Getting pulque to market from any of these communities involved trips of fifteen kilometers to Tlaxcala City and at least thirty to Puebla. Thus, officials realized that the Cabildo or Crown could not easily find new owners for these properties. The properties and landesque capital listed by these town officials provide fascinating details about the nature of peasant agriculture. 72 Town leaders

A Drunken Landscape

|

113

documented thirty properties, more than 75 percent of which contained significant stocks of maguey. About one-quarter of families had owned sheep and exactly half had owned draught animals (mostly oxen). In fact, the rate of oxen ownership among these deceased peasant farmers compares favorably to that of Spanish-owned estates with vast property holdings (see figure 14). Peasant families listed in this document possessed 412 hectares of land and twenty-four draught animals, resulting in a ratio of about 17 hectares to each draught animal. Nearby Spanish estates could not always compete with this level of capital investment. The Cuamancingo estate had 29:1 in 1652, while the Santa Clara Atzompan estate had 26:1 in 1686. More generally, but also more accurately, I computed ratios for each of the seven partidos (divisions) of Tlaxcala for the year 1712. Spanish estates in the region of Apizaco (which includes the four indigenous towns) had a ratio of 24:1; Tlaxco to the north had 14:1; Chiyauhtempan to the south also had 14:1; and to the east Huamantla at 54:1 had much land for very few animals. Lastly, the partidos of Nativitas, San Felipe, and Hueyotlipan each had a ratio of 8:1, but such regions were

FIGURE 14 Ratio of hectares to draught animals in rural Tlaxcala. The graph is coun-

terintuitive in that higher oxen densities have shorter bars; that is, the fewer hectares per ox, the more intensely the land was farmed. González Sánchez, Haciendas y ranchos de Tlaxcala; see the unpaginated tables for each partido. For the estate of San Bartolomé Cuamancingo, see AGN Tierras, Investigation into missed payments, vol. 3306, exp. 1, fol. 20r. For Santa Clara Atzompan, see AGT Fondo Histórico, Presentation of documents, fol. 1v.

114

|

Chapter 3

renowned as intensive wheat producers and thus a low ratio of land to draught animals is not at all surprising. The orphanage document of 1694, then, provides very strong evidence of two interrelated phenomena: first, rates of peasant draught animal usage are equal to or better than those found in most Spanish estates; and second, peasant farmers cultivated maguey in the vast majority of lands. The presence of high populations of draught animals and maguey shows the dominance of the peasant metepantli system in even the most peripheral lands. Moreover, if one supposes that peasant farms made more efficient use of draught animals than Spanish estates—which seems plausible given that poor farmers saw the purchase of oxen as a significant investment and because those who own and work on farms tend to make more efficient use of resources than do hired laborers—the availability of oxen on macehualli farms appears even more astounding. Of course, an important difference between indigenous peasant oxen ownership and that of Spanish estates is that just half of peasants versus all estates owned them. I suspect that similar to Juan Domingo’s business in constructing metepantli, peasants with draught animals rented out their services to those who lacked them. From the perspective offered by the 1694 document, peasant investment and innovation in metepantli field systems seem very impressive. Peasants increased pulque production primarily through a process of infilling and conversion of existing field systems rather than expanding into unused lands. Archaeologists who have studied the origin and morphology of metepantli have found that terracing was added in a piecemeal fashion, not as largescale state-directed initiatives.73 The Pueblan asentista Inchaurriqui had made a similar assertion in 1692, saying that maguey farmers had converted their maize fields. Witnesses from a tribunal into the causes of Puebla’s economic decline had said much the same thing in 1743, except they indicated that the transition had been made from cochineal to pulque.74 The economic incentive of pulque motivated farmers to phase out or remove the less remunerative, but longer lived, perennial plants such as nopal and fruit trees that grew on berms and to replace them with maguey, exclusively. Metepantli construction and maintenance require significant investments of labor and cash to buy land and offsets, all of which would curb expansionist dreams. Contrary to popular belief, maguey cultivation and processing requires huge quantities of labor. A field of thousands of maguey posed a prodigious task, what modern ethnographers have called a “formidable management project whose complexity increases exponentially with increased scale of production.”75

A Drunken Landscape

|

115

Nevertheless, corporate entities such as the altepetl (ethno-political territorial units in Mesoamerica) could undertake the expansion of maguey cultivation on a large scale not possible by individual peasants, using town resources, shared labor, and access to Crown lawyers to fight for and protect agricultural capital. About twenty kilometers north of Tlaxcala City, farmers from San Lucas Tecopilco eventually expanded maguey and pulque production in the Texopan parcel that they finally acquired in 1709 or 1710. The land in question had belonged to Miguel de Ortega, a provincial public notary and private notary of the Cabildo who, from 1699 to 1703, had been battling local natives (including those of Tecopilco) for another large parcel of land that lay downstream, adjacent to the Texopan parcel. After Ortega’s death in 1705, ownership of the Texopan parcel fell to his wife, doña Ana de Nava Altamirano. Indigenous townsfolk from Tecopilco had long sought this land, which bordered their community. In 1695, they litigated unsuccessfully against Captain don Antonio Peres de Oropeza and then again in 1704 against the new owner, Miguel de Ortega. Just before Ortega’s death, Tecopilco farmers had unlawfully entered the Texopan land with oxen and wagons, removing seventysix cargas of barley and forty of hay. Later that year, the provincial court ordered them to give it back to his widow, doña Ana.76 Unwilling to let the parcel slip through their fingers, Tecopilco officials fought once more in 1709 against doña Ana when the Holy Office of the Inquisition opened its long inquiry into the estates of Río de las Vacas (which had at that time incorporated the Texopan parcel) and Cuamancingo. By the end of the decade, however, locals of all stripes had conspired against doña Ana, and eventually farmers from Tecopilco won, or won back (depending on how far back in time one looks) the barley-cultivated land. Local priests from San Martín Xaltocan colluded with Tecopilco farmers and had convinced doña Ana’s seasonal indigenous resident laborers (gañanes) to abandon her estate, which they did. Such acts of desertion—and the central role played by town officials—had emerged as a critical concern for Spanish estates in the province during the eighteenth century. As workers left, they often damaged crops and tools and took livestock.77 The Cabildo also conspired against doña Ana and mandated that her estate manager (mayordomo) withdraw his services, which he promptly did. Without labor and management and with poor weather that destroyed crops, an outbreak of sickness among either her sheep or pigs, and a mismanaged estate in the hands of a renter who left the farm without any seed, doña Ana could no longer pay her debts to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. When

116

|

Chapter 3

officials from the Holy Office arrived in 1709, farmers from Tecopilco vigorously pursued their case and convinced the ecclesiastic judicial body to award them the Texopan parcel. Doña Ana sold the Río de las Vacas estate (without the Texopan parcel) to Captain don Joseph Hernández de Lara in 1712, at which time the latter attempted (unsuccessfully) to repossess the Texopan parcel. The acquisition of the Texopan parcel suggests a two-pronged plan by these farmers and town officials to simultaneously expand hillside maguey cultivation and lowland grain production. Tecopilco began to plant maguey in the Texopan parcel, converting the barley fields into a maguey plantation. By 1727, the Texopan parcel included thousands of maguey plants and still produced barley on the terrace treads.78 This was a dramatic transformation; from its inception around 1605 until 1712, the Río de las Vacas hacienda listed as its primary assets cattle, pigs, sheep, and barley, and never once maguey.79

Pilli Pulque Macehualli and altepetl officials were not alone in converting land into metepantli. As seen below, indigenous nobles (teteuctin, or pipiltin, in Nahuatl; caciques, or principales, in Spanish) led the most rapid and extensive expansion of the metepantli field system in Tlaxcala. In retrospect, their land management strategy was destructive and wasteful of soils. Nobles in Tlaxcala and elsewhere east of the Basin of Mexico were great landholders at the time of the Conquest. Muñoz Camargo described the typical landed estate of a teuctli as comprising numerous parcels, the best of which he kept for himself, while those of poorer quality he distributed among his relations and servants, who then provided the teuctli with produce and labor. He referred to these land/labor complexes as mayorazgo, but most colonial sources reserve this term for entailed Spanish estates and use instead the term cacicazgo, or better, teccalli.80 The teccalli system, however, broke down at the end of the sixteenth century largely because of labor shortages and the resettlement of indigenous farmers into centralized communities located far from teccalli parcels. Cochineal’s unique (familial) labor requirements and the collapse of the Tlaxcalteca population undermined the value of their landed estates. Steadily, power shifted from these elite to pueblo (altepetl) functionaries. Between 1590 and 1610, caciques sold vast quantities of land to Spaniards and thereby created a new rural geography that interspersed Spanish haciendas within indigenous lands. Not all of the teteuctin disappeared

A Drunken Landscape

|

117

completely, and many of those that did staged a renaissance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They had lost control of land but still held onto their rights and privileges. Caciques responded vigorously to pulque opportunities and used their financial and political means to accumulate yet more land through purchases or by repossessing lands for which their family had titles that had not been actively asserted. Families from Atlihuetzyan pursued this route with great vigor and caused much hostility between teteuctin and neighboring towns. They roused suspicions with their claim to tlalmacehualli, or “land of merit,” or more simply, land grants. Teteuctin from Atlihuetzyan had gained (in 1563) mercedes (royal grants) to consolidate and build on their teccalli. Most of these concessions were never kept with the other mercedes, but in later eighteenth-century litigation, they reappeared within the private records of absentee teteuctin. Thus, in the 1730s, distant relatives of teuctli don Baltasar Cuauhtli presented his will from 1628, which recorded a grant of land near a copal tree (“centetl notlalmacehualtzin mani copalcuauhtitlan”) five kilometers distant from Atlihuetzyan, near Apizaco along the Camino Real.81 The land was now in the control of townsfolk from Santa Úrsula Citlaltepec, and the relatives of don Baltasar wanted it back. In 1702, doña Isabel de Castilla y de Galicia (the wife of gobernador and alcalde don Pascual Ramírez) made similar claims to another teccalli in Atlihuetzyan, this time fighting for a twenty-four-hectare hillside tlalmacehualli near the abandoned town of San Baltasar Tochpan, about two kilometers west of Atlihuetzyan. Community officials from San Simón Tlatlauhquitepec and San Francisco Tetlanocan (aka Tlacuilocan) had claimed that the extinct community of San Baltasar had been granted control over the land during the time of congregación, but then as the town was depopulated, the land lay unused for generations. In 1702, however, a “corrupt” teuctli (doña Isabel de Castilla y de Galicia) sold the land to don Diego Hernández (a wealthy indigenous man from the community), claiming that the land had been given as reward to the nobility in 1523. Actually, local officials accused don Diego of paying for the parcel with community funds. He planted winter wheat (trigo aventurero) and maguey at first and then converted the land to the more common metepantli system.82 Seeking restitution, town officials and local farmers started to collect the neuctli themselves, and thus by 1713 the issue landed within the courts. The judge awarded don Diego possession of the land in 1713. Then, years later in 1730, in old age and with failing eyesight, don Diego donated the land to the community so that his children would not have to fight the townsfolk

MAP 16 Towns and disputed teccalli parcels near Atlihuetzyan. Twenty-meter contour lines are shown, as are the disputed parcels, towns, barrios, and hydrology.

A Drunken Landscape

|

119

any longer.83 Once again, long-lost teuctli rights (this time matched with the Cabildo’s power) blended conveniently with eager investors who would lead an economic resurgence with pulque. The Paredes family from Atlihuetzyan provides the best example of this process. At the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the family reclaimed land that had sat idle for generations, while also making major investments in new land. In 1686, don Pedro Martín de Paredes purchased for the large sum of 730 pesos from the Viscaino family (who were Spaniards) a large piece of land that he called Tecozahuatlan (Place of Yellow Earth) that Paredes claimed to have been unimproved at the time of purchase. The land comprised perhaps one hundred hectares, judging by its price. The land lay outside of the densely settled region near Yauhquemecan, where some of don Pedro’s other properties were located. He contracted laborers and initiated the planting of five thousand maguey, to which he attested in 1733.84 Tecozahuatlan lay at the intersection of the Zahuapan River and the creek Tecozahuatlauhtli, on the steeply sloped terrain bordering the Zahuapan River between the hills of Cimatepec and Atlihuetzyan. My calculations derived from 1:50,000 topographical maps indicate the average slope to be close to 15 percent, what Wilken describes as “steep.”85 The toponym is a compound noun, incorporating the elements “tecozahu(itl)-,” “-a(tl)-,” and “-tlan.” Tecozahuitl means yellow ochre, and according to Williams and Harvey “is a silt loam with high water-retention capacity and loose consistency, making it easy to work. Of moderate depth and fertility, these soils probably were cultivated continuously, terraced, and at least partially irrigated.”86 The other elements give the toponym the meaning of “place of yellow ochre soil by the water.” This was good land, but quite friable and on steeply sloped terrain. In an unequivocal statement about the agrarian system he was designing, Paredes declared in his will that he “improved it [i.e., the Tecozahuatlan parcel] with eleven ditches [sanjas] and planted in it about five thousand maguey, as when I purchased it, it did not have anything.” The ditches he mentioned digging (or rather, had had dug) clearly identify the construction of eleven metepantli, each with approximately five hundred maguey. To construct metepantli, laborers excavated ditches approximately sixty centimeters deep and the same wide and piled this soil on either the upside or downside of the trench in order to make the berm. While don Pedro failed to declare the dimensions of the plot, based on the spaces between maguey used in modern metepantli, the five thousand maguey would have taken up only fourteen hectares.87 For seven

120

|

Chapter 3

hundred pesos, he received a much larger parcel than this, but we do not know what was done with most of the land. Far more significant than the area of the Tecozahuatlan parcel is the number of linear meters of metepantli (fifteen thousand), which permits a calculation of the number of person-days of labor required to construct the metepantli. Again, following Wilken’s estimates (based on the Mexican government’s 1972 estimates), a day’s work (for one person) in soft soil would excavate no more than twenty-five linear meters of ditch, a number that decreases to fifteen for moderately compacted soil, ten for tepetlatl, and five for rocky terrain.88 Taking the median value of fifteen as a good estimate for the Tecozahuatlan parcel, it appears that don Pedro’s metepantli project required no fewer than one thousand person-days of labor. Putting this another way, if he had employed ten laborers, they would work for one hundred days each, or, taking into consideration the number of Sundays and holidays (which were plentiful in colonial Mexico), one could assume that ten peons spent almost the entire six-month dry season digging trenches. Such long hours of backbreaking labor—not to mention the likely costs of tool breakage and repair, or more importantly, the work involved in actually planting the maguey offsets—would have deterred all but the most dedicated metepantli expansionists. Unfortunately, one cannot determine if don Pedro constructed the metepantli in one season or chose to progress in a piecemeal fashion over the fortyseven years that he owned the plot. Ideally, construction would progress from bottom row and move upslope so as to catch the considerable quantities of soils that would have eroded during the first years after construction. A slow progression, say, over ten years, would reduce the velocity of torrents because unaltered land would protect soils and permit rainfall to infiltrate the soil. If he put all metepantli into production at the same time, the first rainfall after the winter construction phase would have produced strong rilling, gullying, and then slope wash, followed by massive soil movements. Thus, from an environmental perspective, a slow construction program would have made sense. On the other hand, economic considerations may have convinced him to proceed much faster. After all, he paid 730 pesos for the land and would be eager to see a return on this considerable investment. In the first scenario, somewhere between year ten and year twelve he would see his first returns, but only on 10 percent of the land’s potential productive output. Full production would begin only after twenty years of expenditures, at which time he would start to turn a profit. Alternatively, if don Pedro constructed all of the necessary metepantli in the

A Drunken Landscape

|

121

first year, he would have turned a profit in year thirteen, and by year twenty he would have earned an extra two thousand pesos from the land as compared to the first scenario. Given this comparison, it is logical to assume that don Pedro would seek to maximize his short-term revenue and would consider erosion as collateral damage.89 Don Pedro Paredes listed among his property many other marginal land parcels, each of them worth hundreds of pesos and many planted with maguey. While his land holdings were certainly extensive and such titles almost never describe what is actually on the land, it is certainly significant that no less than five of his plots bordered land that was described as eroded.90 Similarly, he bought the Tochpan “ranch” that had belonged to Alonso Hernández (a Spaniard) where the latter had in 1675 planted maguey on an area of about one square kilometer (600 × 600 brazas). If Hernández had planted the entire area with maguey, a stocking rate of four hundred maguey per hectare would result in as many as forty thousand plants in the parcel. An ongoing dispute over the ranch reveals rare details about the condition of its soils. By 1722 fluvial erosion had degraded the land, now described as tepetlatl, or hardpan, in which “one cannot cultivate or even keep up the said maguey.”91 South of Tecopilco and north of Yauhquemecan, the teccalli of Tepeticpac held by doña Josepha had spent more than three thousand pesos on land holdings that she described as a number of parcels situated on the northern flank of the Analco Hill (near Cuauhtla, a barrio of Santa Bárbara Acuicuitzcatepec) and populated by maguey and grazing sheep. Interestingly, the investment derived from the marriage of doña Josepha with a Spaniard, Matías de Cabrera Celís, who claimed his family planted the maguey sometime between 1626 and 1686.92 Spaniards also bought maguey plots near Acuicuitzcatepec and the abandoned town of San Pablo Ollacayocan, where José de Zavala had set up a pulque farm that at the time of his death in 1694 comprised six thousand maguey, valued at 4,500 pesos, one-half of the value of his entire estate.93 Zavala was not the only Spaniard pursuing the burgeoning pulque markets. These few examples do not constitute a complete list of the major maguey plantations in the upper Zahuapan River basin, but do represent the vigor with which large landholders pursued this industry.94 The process also shows that as with other industries in Tlaxcala, indigenous people (both peasant and cacique) designed and popularized the metepantli system and the production of pulque. Large producers (often Spaniards) entered the market well after the original conceptualization of the agrosystem by indigenous peoples. Historian John

122

|

Chapter 3

Kicza’s study of the Mexico City pulque trade shows that Spaniards dominated the industry (from production to sale) in the viceregal capital. Yet in places such as Oaxaca and Toluca, the indigenous population retained control over production. Tlaxcala resembles the latter, not the former. An early eighteenth-century Tlaxcalan census shows few Spaniards participated in the pulque industry before the second half of the eighteenth century. When the new Bourbon Crown consolidated its power in New Spain, it immediately set out to assess the value and capital of all rural estates (for the purpose of taxation). In Tlaxcala, government officials carried out the census in 1712. Of the reporting estates (eighty-seven haciendas and fifty-eight ranchos), only a single one had maguey. The midsize farm (rancho de labor) was located on the slopes of Malinche (near Santa Ana Chiyauhtempan), composed of eighty-six hectares (two caballerías) of arable land, possessed eight draught oxen, and was valued at only one thousand pesos.95 Given these numbers, this rancho had no more than twelve hundred maguey, exactly the number of maguey that a single farmer could hope to manage single-handedly.96 Exemplifying the scant nature of Spanish investment in pulque farms before the middle of the eighteenth century, the Hacienda de Piedras Negras located near Apizaco (in the Atenco subcatchment of the Zahuapan River), reported no maguey in 1712 but by 1793 contained fiftytwo thousand.97 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Bethlehemites from Puebla purchased the estate, built an inn for travelers, and directed the estate’s resources toward the production of pulque. Indeed, such a transition from livestock and grain farming proved highly profitable and attractive to many enlightened estate managers far outside of Tlaxcala’s borders, such as the Jesuits who controlled the diverse properties of the Santa Lucía Hacienda located on the northern periphery of Mexico City. Beginning in the 1730s, income from pulque production on the Jesuit estates drove profits upward. By 1746, the estate’s managers had planted seventy thousand new maguey plants. By 1767, they had converted ten thousand hectares of damaged pasture with nearly forty kilometers of stone fences surrounding the plantations. As Herman Konrad attests: Livestock production became a less important source of revenue, and this was reflected in smaller flocks of sheep, goats, cattle, and horses. . . . Cereal crops

continued to be produced, but the source of income from Santa Lucía had

undergone a transformation. During the last years of Jesuit ownership [in 1767], pulque produced 80 percent of Santa Lucía’s revenues. Santa Lucía had been converted into a pulque hacienda.98

A Drunken Landscape

|

123

While more research is needed to explore the links between indigenous pulque plantations and large-scale Spanish or Creole haciendas, Konrad’s study of the Jesuit-owned Santa Lucía Hacienda suggests that Spaniards followed the metepantli field system innovated by indigenous farmers. Konrad notes that “when the Jesuits joined the general trend [of converting land into pulque plantations], they incorporated existing technology and procedures, adding an efficient system of administration.”99 Much of the terminology for the age and type of maguey plant derived from Nahuatl, and the metepantli fields system predominated. Konrad also suggests that degradation followed in the wake of expanding pulque production. While “only good land was used, and the mayordomos who planted maguey in infertile land (tepetate) did so at the risk of personally paying the labor costs,” the metepantli became associated with “land too arid or rocky to support livestock, or in a deteriorated state because of overgrazing.”100 Once again, maguey plantations began on good soil but ended by clinging to the remnants of soil from a more fertile era.

Collateral Damage The speed with which these maguey projects were established and the sheer size of the lands in question lead me to believe that this form of land management was particularly degrading to the environment. Wealthy farmers and town projects exposed entire hillsides to erosive forces over the course of a few short years. Poor maintenance of berms and careless cultivation of treads could promote erosion. And worse, wholesale field abandonment could result in a complete failure of the terracing system. After the Mexican Revolution, for instance, land reform programs offered hillside farmers a chance to cultivate the much more fertile valley-bottom land, leading to metepantli abandonment and severe erosion.101 I now follow this hypothesis for the Late Maunder Minimum, a climateinduced biological crisis that could destabilize agave fields (figure 15). The crisis began in 1691 when a disastrous frost in the late summer season ruined crops and left the Tlaxcalteca ill-equipped to deal with the long, hard winter of 1692 that was both cold and snowy. A five-day winter snowstorm that year, beginning on February 2, dumped so much snow that it killed a large part of the livestock population. Riots broke out in Mexico City and Tlaxcala in 1692. In the latter, rioters burned government offices and stoned those whom they deemed

124

|

Chapter 3

F I G U R E 1 5 The Late Maunder Minimum crisis in Tlaxcala. Two distinct proxies— archival documents and tree-ring PDSI in the Correlation Area— attest to an extended period of cold and drought from 1691 until 1713. responsible: political officeholders. Tlaxcala’s Spanish governor responded by hanging and quartering those rebels identified as leaders of the uprising, while in Mexico City, viceregal authorities banned pulque and other liquors for five years thereafter.102 Inebriation was a convenient scapegoat for the enormous vulnerability of the populace. In 1692, the Jesuits had urged the viceroy to “prohibit and prevent— using all means possible—that anyone gain benefit from, or sell throughout the viceroyalty, this noxious and scandalous liquor.” (This did not stop the Jesuits from converting many of their livestock and grain haciendas to pulque estates in the mid-eighteenth century.)103 The Cabildo of Mexico City declared that pulque drove indios to laziness, sodomy, incest, rape of children, sacrilege and adultery. This vice is still

more injurious because congregated in shops where this drink is sold [i.e., pul-

querías] with the endless infamous masses that abound in this city of mestizos, negros, and mulattos, there is not a wickedness they will not commit, scams and

robberies that do not foment disputes. As such, although your Majesty has this

asiento whose rent benefits the Crown each year, we should assure ourselves

with great Catholic zeal that it is better to annul this rent than to lose to this drink so many souls and to end with such pernicious consequences that risk again your Majesty’s reign as it did before.104

Believing that indios were not innately malicious and thus incapable of such a purposeful inversion of the social hierarchy or, alternatively, wishing to find

A Drunken Landscape

|

125

a scapegoat for the underlying problem of social vulnerability that resulted when the colonial government failed to store grain and keep food prices low, authorities identified drunkenness as the cause of the uprising.105 Epidemics, hunger, and cold weather persisted until 1697. One scholar even claims that the prolonged crisis exposed the fraudulent nature of the Tlaxcalan indigenous government, resulting in a full-scale shift from corrupt elite government to grassroots politics.106 There was a slight reprieve during the next two years, but famine, disease, and cold winters repeated themselves again between 1695 and 1697. In Mexico City, epidemics continued in 1699, 1700, 1702, 1704, 1705, 1707, and 1708, making these years the worst mortality crisis since at least 1576, and perhaps 1545. Human mortality was substantial in both 1692 and 1695, with rates of about 20 percent for each episode.107 Five droughts occurred between 1700 and 1705. In fact, between 1694 and 1711, central Mexico suffered ten years of drought. Cumulatively, during the last decade, the adult population (i.e., those who could farm) decreased by one-third. Even if a slight surge in births took place, those extra mouths to feed added to the difficulty of tending the fields. High mortality rates helped to increase migration out of the province. The years of hunger drove many farmers to Mexico City to find food and work, even if the granaries were empty there too.108 Making matters worse was the Crown’s insistence that Tlaxcala pay its tribute regardless of the crisis.109 Those who stayed in the community found themselves responsible to pay not only their own tribute but that of their relatives. Neuctli and mexcalli had long served as potential sources of energy and nutrition when maize crops failed. Consumption of mexcalli would accelerate the rate by which maguey disappeared and thereby accelerate the disintegration of metepantli. Alternatively, the crisis spurred abandonment because, on the one hand, urban stores of maize attracted rural farmers to cities, while on the other hand taxes imposed on the remaining farmers tempted them to leave and forgo maguey sustenance.110 The indigenous Cabildo had great difficulty paying its tribute to the Crown and complained that against its best wishes, it had been forced to sell off the fields of maguey owned by peasants. As it said: in order to be able to pay [the tribute] it had to be taken from the towns and by the Cabildo selling off their maguey and lands that should have been maintained except that no other recourse could be found other than to imprison a

126

|

Chapter 3

few people for the shortfall of ’95 that is still owed; many have fled from the violence to other lands, coming back only to die of hunger and at the same

time compelled to pay up [both] for themselves and for those who died in their towns, many of which are currently empty of people [desiertos].111

The Cabildo’s threat to confiscate land and maguey was not rhetorical. The year before, it made good on its promise to carry out the Crown’s cruel demands and organized a committee to travel throughout the province and collect taxes, or otherwise, to jail and remove property. The committee’s report indicated that much maguey land had been abandoned.112 While the Cabildo seized land and maguey in 1694 from towns such as Xaloztoc, one must ask who was available or interested in buying it.113 Officially, there had been an outright ban on pulque sales since 1692, and thus the maguey had no cash value. The Crown demanded compliance with its law on June 30, 1692, which according to Antonio de Robles’s “Diary of Notable Events” ( July 19, 1692) pertained to all of New Spain.114 Transgressors were subjected to a fine of two hundred pesos if they were Spanish, while indios received lashes and hard labor in the obrajes.115 The Crown issued some exemptions to the pulque ban, but none to Tlaxcala—or at least none brought to light by colonial documentation. Curiously, the payments made by Puebla’s asentista de pulque did not dry up altogether during the ban. He paid the 1692 rent in full (as it was expected of all asentistas116) and then continued to pay a small part of the rent in 1693 (one-fifth), 1694 (onethird), and 1695 (three-tenths).117 As mentioned above, Tlaxcala had been paying twelve hundred pesos for a number of years, and thus the asentista must have collected tax from other unidentified—although legal—sources. It is important to note that Spaniards, too, died during the “measles” epidemic of 1694, and thus when pulque producers such as José de Zavala passed away that year, he left an enormous stock of maguey. Land and maguey were at this time worthless commodities. Imagine the consternation of men like don Pedro Martín de Paredes who had spent thousands of pesos installing the hillside metepantli, only to encounter a total ban on pulque at exactly the time when the plants could finally be harvested and, moreover, to find no laborers to harvest. Even when the pulque trade was restored in 1697, the industry came back to life slowly. The transportation system that helped to expand the trade in 1670 and remained essential to the industry had collapsed, apparently because animals were infertile during the drought that lasted almost two decades.118 The

A Drunken Landscape

|

127

cold winter weather, heavy snowfalls that lasted for a week at times, and the recurring episodes of drought pushed central Mexican vegetation to its limits, meaning that grass and other animal feed would be in short supply. Extensive grazing, one imagines, helped to reduce plant cover during the 1690s and afterward, exposing hillside soils and adding to the already severe climate stress on vegetation. We do not know how many fields fell victim to the crisis nor how severely they were affected. Clearly, metepantli did not collapse in all parts of Tlaxcala during the 1690s; some fields were more susceptible than others. Least vulnerable were those fields in densely settled areas with many hands and extended families to carry on the work and with an integrated, complex agrosystem, such as the corporate town enterprises in and around Yauhquemecan or Tecopilco. Failures and partial collapses of these metepantli undoubtedly occurred. Longterm maintenance tasks such as cleaning ditches and redistributing soil and nutrients to the tread were likely quickly neglected. Maguey undoubtedly sent out stalks and wasted away, but no matter how difficult the situation became, peasant farmers would do everything in their power to ensure that breaks did not open in the metepantli. Networks of families would help to maintain the very basic upkeep on the farms; the costs of erosion were simply too high for them to pay. Finally, if any illicit pulque markets remained open throughout the ban, they would be small and local, best supplied by casual vendors and local producers with small volumes, the type of operations that dominated before the pulquería. There is little to suggest that large maguey plantations could find any relief during these difficult times. Managing these large plantations during a social crisis proved difficult. First of all, without a vested interest in the long-term health of the plants and soils, hired labor does not work as long or as conscientiously as those in small, owner-operated farms. Thus, one of the resulting ironies of the poorly managed metepantli is that in the short term, they grow faster and yield more neuctli. The accumulation of nutrients at the berm propels the plants. Thus, many large plantations already suffered from either breaks in the metepantli or early plant expiration. In fact, if short-term profits took precedence over the long-term health of the soils, smaller investments of labor benefited the farmer. In any case, regardless of the pre-1692 management strategies, land management on these plantations deteriorated under a worsening labor supply. Labor shortages plagued haciendas in Tlaxcala from the 1660s

128

|

Chapter 3

onward as competition intensified and Tlaxcalan towns succeeded more often at attracting and even stealing away indigenous workers.119 Because caciques expanded maguey production in the late seventeenth century by buying and establishing “ranches” and “haciendas” that stood apart from their ancestral lands, they relied on these same shrinking labor markets. Of course, their plight was made considerably worse by the fact that bureaucrats gave no indication of when the pulque markets would resume. In a time of miniscule and highly competitive labor supplies and virtually nonexistent pulque markets, owners of large maguey plantations undoubtedly found it too difficult and expensive to maintain their quickly expiring fields. In this scenario, it seems reasonable to conclude that large maguey enterprises started the 1690s with soils and terraces more vulnerable to collapse than small, privately owned plots. If these scenarios are accurate, the crisis of the 1690s almost certainly helped to accelerate soil depletion. As soils degraded and moved beyond the reach of the berm, neuctli yields fell. Thus, as pulque sales grew again during the eighteenth century, plantations with depleted soils and slower growth rates for maguey experienced declining productivity, which precipitated further expansion and colonization of yet more marginal soils in order to keep up the volume of sap extraction.

Conclusion The metepantli was a creative and profitable response to the early Little Ice Age (i.e., the Colonial Mexican Pluvial), an event that spurred the shift to drought- and frost-tolerant maguey cultivation. Over the course of the seventeenth century, maguey cultivation migrated from infield gardens to marginal, sloped land using the metepantli field system. The new location of the maguey in metepantli accommodated the enormous rise in pulque demand in central New Spain’s cities and towns and represented a narrowing range of uses of the maguey from an indispensable source of clothing, building materials, and drink, to a single commodity sold in local and regional markets. The diffusion of Old World draught animals (namely mules and oxen) was essential to the energetics of the agrosystem, a shift from somatic to extra-somatic systems that situated Tlaxcala within a cascading system of nested ecologies whereby changes in one entity rippled through the rest.

A Drunken Landscape

|

129

If the pluvial was the first act of the Little Ice Age, the Late Maunder Minimum was its final curtain call, a traumatic multidecadal extreme that ushered in a new ecological and political era. It forced the withdrawal of both human and animal labor, contracted pulque production, and urged the abandonment of metepantli, precipitating mass soil movements, desiccation/flooding, and social/agrarian turmoil for decades and even centuries afterward. As fields were progressively degraded, they produced lower yields and farmers were thus forced to extend the cultivation system to ever more marginal fields. Counterintuitive feedback mechanisms inherent to the metepantli system produced an unusual, counterintuitive situation in which incipient erosion and nutrient movements actually increased short-term pulque yields and thus benefited the most reckless farmers. The degradation of terrace treads, which were cultivated with plows and seeded with barley and other crops—in the usual metepantli arrangement—actually fostered nutrient accumulation at the berms. Indeed, even the degradation of upslope berms, whose soils traveled downslope, benefited the soils of berms and metepantli in the lower flanks. Archaeological and historical evidence suggests that indigenous farmers had deliberately used erosion to manage soils, and thus it is not unthinkable that maguey farmers used such strategies to improve pulque production on metepantli. As Borejsza notes, “while erosion is detrimental to agriculture in the plot where it is occurring, it often has beneficial effects at some distance downslope. Farmers recognize and often actively manage this paradox.”120 In the eyes of the farmer, erosion was not an evil by-product of the metepantli but, when controlled, a gravity-fed fertilization system. Yet the system could and did also produce unwanted and uncontrolled soil movements that carried precious hillside soils beyond the berms and to gullies, river channels, and floodplains. We will see in the next chapters that the Late Maunder Minimum was not only a trigger for hydrological and edaphic transformations across central Mexico, but spurred the transition to a new rural ecology and a more turbulent and vulnerable society. Despite connecting indigenous agriculture to the origins of severe degradation, this is not a declensionist story of ecological “collapse” or social degeneration. The metepantli field system was a brilliant—and enormously profitable— agricultural system that spread across most of central Mexico and transformed indigenous communities and economic culture. These profits facilitated, in the eighteenth century, an adoption of the metepantli system in some of the

130

|

Chapter 3

largest and wealthiest estates in Mexico. Thus, the pulque industry did not fail; production soared to new heights, especially in Spanish estates that bought out abandoned indigenous maguey plantations. Even in indigenous hands, the metepantli system returned significant profits. Similarly, as we will see in coming chapters, in the floodplains below that bore the brunt of cataclysmic chaos, new opportunities arose in the deep alluvium. For those in a position to brandish their powers to control capricious soil and water resources, climate- and agricultural-induced degradation commenced not a universal fall but a redistribution of shrinking resources and a remaking of the colonial environment. It is to the aftermath of this crisis that we now turn.

CHAPTER 4

Embedded Lives Silt, Water, and Politics

O

n September 20, 1703, nine indigenous officials and a multitude (otros muchos) of local indigenous farmers from the towns of San Martín Xaltocan, Santa Bárbara Acuicuitzcatepec, San Lucas Tecopilco, San Simón Tlatlauhquitepec, and La Asumpción Huitzcolotepec traveled down from their hilltop villages to assemble in the fields near the Zahuapan River. They came to witness and participate in a much-anticipated legal ceremony in which the provincial court (Audiencia Ordinaria) of Tlaxcala would soon delimit and declare their ownership of a large tract of land (map 17).1 The acts of delimiting (amojonamiento) and taking possession (posesión) required the humbling participation of the townspeople’s opponents: Spaniards who owned neighboring haciendas and, more poignantly, members of the Cabildo of the province of Tlaxcala. The issue pitted not only colonizer against the colonized, but more directly, native against native or more specifically the highest level of indigenous government in Tlaxcala (the Cabildo) against local indigenous town officials. Over the past decade, and even before, the Cabildo had battled this collective of five towns many times, each time failing to prove its case. The same result was playing out again in 1703, culminating in a long day spent among intransigent subalterns who no doubt relished this very public manifestation of the Cabildo’s defeat. The Cabildo had claimed that the land in question belonged to the “Ejidos de los Llanos de Atlancatepec,” a tract of land that the provincial government

132

|

Chapter 4

MAP 17 Disputed land (altepetlalli or ejido), circa 1703, Tlaxcala.

reserved for the abasto de carne, a legal monopoly to supply meat to the butchers of Tlaxcala City. The Cabildo had its economic interests to protect. The abasto contract was lucrative and attracted wealthy Spaniards who paid significant sums for the exclusive right to supply meat and, moreover, to pasture animals in the Ejidos. Ultimately, the Cabildo framed its arguments within the discourse of immemorial rights and freehold tenure, thereby defining itself as a corporate entity with exclusive interests inconsistent with those of towns and townsfolk. Feeling squeezed by the growing influence of the local governments, it stood firm against the demands of the less powerful but more numerous indigenous town governments.2 However, the five towns had strong titles and had proven their rights many times over, first in 1672, then again in 1677, 1699, 1701, 1702, and now twice in 1703. The towns proved beyond any doubt that they had possessed the land since the early seventeenth century when don Gregorio Nacianceno (gobernador of the Cabildo) gave them title to the land as remuneration for providing food

Embedded Lives

|

133

to the sick during the terrible epidemics of the 1630s.3 Since that time, and especially since the uprisings of the 1670s, 1680s, and 1690s, local and provincial politics had become acrimonious.4 Less abstractly, the dispute had become personal. The Ejidos dispute transcended economic and political interests. The issue exposed Tlaxcala’s corrupt politics and the workings of personal vendetta, especially involving don Pascual Ramírez, who had recently acceded to the post of indigenous gobernador of the Cabildo, for the fourth time. He would do so again in 1705, despite the humiliating defeats at the hands of townsfolk.5 When the provincial court requested don Pascual’s presence in the amojonamiento of the Ejidos on September 20, 1703, don Pascual failed to appear.6 Indeed don Pascual or one of his associates had lost or was losing court battles with every one of these indigenous communities over land that bordered or was visible from the Ejidos. To their west lay the Texopan parcel over which the Cabildo’s notary Miguel de Ortega litigated unsuccessfully with the town of Tecopilco.7 Ortega—owner of the nearby Río de las Vacas estate—had also been summoned to the amojonamiento, but as with don Pascual, the Cabildo’s notary did not appear. Don Pascual’s affairs with these towns ran deeper and more disreputably than his notary’s. To the south not even don Pascual’s position as governor and his wife’s noble status had let him assume possession of the Tochpan parcel from the people of San Simón Tlatlauhquitepec or the Acuauhtla parcel from the nobles of Santa Bárbara Acuicuitzcatepec.8 In these cases, too, the very attorney who led the collective litigation for the Ejidos, procurador Antonio de Baldivieso, had stymied his schemes. Thus, to have spent that afternoon with his legal tormentor and nine town officials (not to mention the numerous townspeople who followed the Spanish gobernador throughout his proceedings) would have publicly confirmed his harrowing and humiliating failures, no less than would three or four hours of silent ridicule from insolent underlings who had managed to wrench away this valuable real estate from the Cabildo. The Ejidos conflict is a rare example where the lines of history cross frequently enough to put cause and effect on the same piece of land and to personalize environmental forces that usually lack human agency. Most notable were the effects of climatic anomalies, for it was a terrible spate of recent droughts that drove the abasto contractee, don Domingo Calderón, to submit his 1705 petition to the Spanish gobernador. The complainant avowed that apart from the Ejidos “there was no other place to pasture in the rigors of the dry season” and that the Ejidos benefited from “the proximity of the river that comes from

134

|

Chapter 4

San Agustín Tlaxco [i.e., the Zahuapan River] and that passes through the said lands.”9 Not only was the decade from 1696 to 1705 the driest of the last six hundred years, but the last “wet” year (i.e., more than one standard deviation above normal) occurred in 1681. Indeed, seventeen of the last twenty-four years had been below normal, and seven of those statistically anomalous. Epizootics among bovines and equines broke out in 1697 and were still being reported in 1702. Although the loss of pasture would shrink don Domingo’s supply of feed for the animals, without water the entire herd risked death. Yet the very droughts that drove don Domingo to the courts also attracted indigenous farmers to the Ejidos with ploughs, oxen, and the intent to divert water from the river to their fields. Having just survived a decade of fierce population loss, the townsfolk fought for the Ejidos not because they lacked land—there was plenty of it—but because they lacked land as fertile and as well watered as that of the Ejidos. Although it took recurrent droughts to bring open conflict to the Ejidos, farmers had long since prepared the ground. The incursion of cultivation was but a ripple emanating from a surge of new activity on the surrounding hillsides. Many parcels visible from the Ejidos (including all those previously mentioned) showed distinctive signs of a new agrarian system that reared the native maguey plant (Agave spp.) to produce pulque, an alcoholic beverage consumed in stunning quantities in central Mexico. Within a few hundred meters of the Ejidos lay many examples of this agrarian system that had recently sprouted: the aforementioned Texopan, Acuauhtla, and Tochpan parcels; the Tecozahuatlan parcel to the southeast; and the land owned by José de Zavala to the southwest, near the abandoned town of San Pablo Ollacayocan.10 Indigenous noblemen like don Pascual had moved quickly to establish themselves in the burgeoning industry, even using the political power of the Cabildo to fight against the viceregal government’s tax on pulque. As we saw in the last chapter, maguey plantations on fragile hillsides had expanded quite recklessly in the mid- to late seventeenth century and then, amid a human crisis of a severity matched only by those during the sixteenth century, deteriorated between 1690 and 1710. In the mid-1690s, measles and other diseases combined to kill more than 25 percent of the population in Tlaxcala. As will be outlined in this chapter, this humanitarian crisis left an indelible mark on Tlaxcala’s environment. Soil instability in hillside maguey plantations produced slopewash, deep gullies, sediment ridges, alluvial fans, and deep alluviation in palustrine and riverine ecosystems. At the beginning of the colonial era,

Embedded Lives

|

135

Tlaxcala had possessed ample grass and water for raising Old World livestock, and the Ejidos, too, had benefited from the abundant waters of the Zahuapan River basin. Enormous wetlands had extended over the northwestern portion of the parcel in question. Indeed, the entire geography of livestock raising had been established during the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, and now this relic of a previous climatic era proved quite troublesome in the eighteenth century. Three years after don Domingo submitted his petition, the Cabildo initiated a fullscale inquiry into the changing nature of the Zahuapan River and, subsequently, an unsuccessful century-long effort to restore the equilibrium between water and society in Tlaxcala. To reconstruct the changing hydrology, some unconventional historical methods are used. I reconstruct a chronology of flood events in Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán, comparing the sequences in each basin to each other and to that of Mexico City. This multibasin comparative flood analysis explores aspects such as flood frequencies, climate-flood correlations, cross-basin flood synchronicity, and the spatial distribution of flood events. This analysis is then put into conversation with other fluvial dynamics, such as wetland extent and spring discharge. Finally, geomorphic evidence is brought to bear on this problem. Evidence of erosion and especially alluviation is gathered and, when possible, dated in order to determine the temporal dynamics of mass soil movements. After this hydrological analysis, the chapter explores how lives moved with soil and water. In the wake of the new hydrological regime—characterized by desiccated wetlands, falling stream flow, a flashflood regime, widespread hillside erosion, deep valley alluviation, and the creation of elevated stream channels that bypassed natural water storage in floodplains—humans responded. The lives of central Mexicans were too deeply embedded in the web of biophysical and ecological relations to avoid such a fate. We find new land uses, investments in landesque capital, agrarian expansion, scapegoating, predations on neighboring properties, and other such creative acts—with unknown payoffs—carried out within a dynamic human-environment interface. I offer several examples that build on the altepetlalli case that opened this chapter. An important one takes us to the heart of the hydrological crisis, to the city of Tlaxcala and its struggle with its “greatest enemy,” the Zahuapan. Subsequently, examples are chosen from the lower Teotihuacán Valley to show competition between floodplain property owners for the shifting patterns of silt and water, and then (as a final case) the litigation between the town of Acolman and its own priest, who sought to move the local parish to a nearby town in order to avoid the

136

|

Chapter 4

destructive floods that had left the church in ruins; when that failed, residents raised arms against the priest and the militia who sought to quell the rebellion. These examples show both nature’s prodding of human action and the independent, creative, and sometimes ill-advised character of these actions. Before recounting these stories, we look first at the birth of central Mexico’s cataclysmic landscape.

A New Flood Regime The patterns of floods in the Zahuapan River basin in Tlaxcala and the San Juan River basin in the Teotihuacán Valley elucidate the birth of a new hydrological regime in the eighteenth century. Figure 16 makes clear that the problems experienced in Tlaxcala City during the eighteenth century do not precede that century and that flooding in Teotihuacán surged, too, in the first few decades of the eighteenth century.11 The first metric is the frequency of floods, which increased dramatically in the eighteenth century, reaching a peak in both basins in the 1770s. Indeed, flood frequency remained quite constant until the 1690s, with about one or two floods every twenty-five years. Afterward, between five and seven events were registered every twenty-five years. The process is delayed by about three decades in Acolman. In the case of the Valley of Teotihuacán—as gauged in Acolman—we see a fast and sudden onset to flooding in the 1730s (1732, 1736, 1737), continuing in the 1740s (1741, 1747), and then taking on a frequency in the second half of the eighteenth century that matched the peaks in Tlaxcala of one in every five years.

FIGURE 16 Flood frequency in Tlaxcala City (Tlaxcala) and Acolman Dam (Teotihuacán).

Embedded Lives

|

137

Until 1690, flooding occurred—almost without deviation—during multiyear periods with high soil humidity. Chapters 1 and 2 already addressed this climate-flooding correlation for the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, so it need not be addressed here. Afterward, the tight parallelism continues during the wet phase from 1643 to 1652 and again—although with less extreme humidity— from 1670 to 1682. Floods in the 1640s, 1650s, and 1670s follow the logic of the early colonial era. By the 1690s, however, the climate proxies of soil humidity no longer match the flood history. Perhaps the extreme cold of the 1690s and 1710s can partially explain the high frequency of floods. Indeed, as we will see immediately below, flooding was synchronized across multiple watersheds during this period. Afterward, however, how can we explain that of the dozens of flood events, only one flood—in Tlaxcala, in 1721—occurred when soil humidity was significantly high? A third metric is flood synchronicity. By comparing flood events across three different basins (Tlaxcala, Teotihuacán, and Mexico City), we are able to discern patterns in the vulnerability of watersheds. The hypothesis here is that near-simultaneous flooding in multiple watersheds likely were profoundly influenced by climate, perhaps caused by major multiday precipitation events or long-term groundwater maxima. In either situation, climate anomalies would produce floods in more than one basin at a time. Discreet local floods, on the other hand, suggest that groundwater levels contributed little or not at all to the floods. Such events indicate that factors other than climate were to blame, such as localized convective systems with limited geographic extent or less powerful regional systems. As such, discreet events reveal the high susceptibility of local watersheds to flooding. Until the end of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1715), all floods occurred in at least two basins in the same year or in back-to-back years. With the exception of the floods between 1697 and 1714, all coincided with wet phases. Indeed, many of the floods occurred simultaneously in all three basins, demonstrating the very strong climate forces at play. This synchronicity broke down in the eighteenth century. Combining data for Tlaxcala or Teotihuacán, we find forty-four flood events, twenty-eight (64 percent) of which are discrete events (defined here as years with floods in only one of the three basins in question). There is not a single year in which all three regions flooded simultaneously. Dividing the colonial era crudely into two halves, we find that in the second half only 25 percent of floods occurred simultaneously in two or more basins as opposed to about 75 percent in the first half.12

138

|

Chapter 4

Finally, a fourth indication of a new hydrological regime is the spatial distribution of flooding within a particular basin. Given specific local geomorphic conditions—such as Tlaxcala City or the convent of Acolman—particular sites should act as hydrological gauges. Indeed, this is the rationale of methodology followed here. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, new sites began to report flooding. In the Teotihuacán Valley, for example, early colonial flooding affected only the convent. By the 1730s, floods reached farther and farther into the more elevated regions and ultimately within the Manantiales subbasin. In 1753, a flood hit El Calvario so hard that people moved about by canoe for some time afterward.13 In 1763, the town was hit again, as was San Marcos Tlalnepantla in 1766, forcing a relocation of the town.14 In 1772, floods affected areas well outside of the dam reservoir at the estate of San José Acolman, farther upstream in San Juan Teotihuacán, and even in Otumba in the upper valley. In 1781, the town of San Juan and surrounding estates were once again flooded.15 Contemporary observers used a sort of “catch and release” model to explain the high frequency of floods in the eighteenth century. According to this logic, flooding was caused by property owners upstream of the flood site who opened flood gates during high precipitation events. In her study of Guanajuato flooding, for instance, Georgina Endfield notes that “the majority of recorded flood events . . . were ascribed to human manipulation of the water supply in the region and may well have been a function of the complex myriad of water diversion channels, dams, and reservoirs.”16 In Tlaxcala, an inspector arrived from Mexico City in 1707 to investigate the Cabildo’s claims that dams upstream had caused flooding in the city. The Cabildo had argued that when estates opened the floodgates to these dams, the subsequent rush of water posed a danger to downstream users. The inspector rejected the Cabildo’s explanation.17 The “catch and release” model served well the interests of its advocates. For instance, the Cabildo’s focus on dams in 1707 and afterward was guided by taxation policy. The indigenous government sought the ability to impose new taxes on Spaniards to pay for repairs to the main river channel and its floodplain by Tlaxcala City. On the other hand, neighboring estates denounced each other because of struggles over water or longstanding complaints between them.18 Attuned to the biases of his historical sources, historian James Riley suggests long-term soil erosion as a more likely cause.19 The four metrics of the changing flood regime examined suggest that the problem had deeper temporal roots than the dam theory suggests. Over the course of the eighteenth century, flooding occurred (a) three times more fre-

Embedded Lives

|

139

quently than before, (b) rarely at the same time as climate-driven high humidity, (c) as increasingly discrete events in only one of the three regions, and (d) at a growing number of sites within the basins. The trigger of flooding was a wholescale transformation of the geomorphology of the valleys, from hillsides to floodplains to the lower valleys. We now turn our attention to this transformation, looking first at Tlaxcala’s watershed and then that of the Teotihuacán Valley.

Shifting Terrain There is little doubt that the terrain of central Mexican watersheds had shifted and that mass soil movements occurred in lockstep with the new flood regime. Let us begin with the situation in Tlaxcala, which offers a very convincing picture of a geomorphic transformation. Downstream of Tlaxcala City, an inspection of the river in 1783 revealed the formation of large sand dunes and a river channel elevated above the level of the surrounding agricultural fields. Francisco Theodoro de Portal, the owner of an estate downstream of the city, noted that in the forty years since the purchase of the estate, in 1743, the river had alluviated to such a degree that the river channel had aggraded meters above its original elevation and actually sat much higher than neighboring terrain. In the 1740s, to divert water to fields, dams were needed to raise the river. By 1783, diversion canals could be cut from the embankments of the now-elevated channel. From these cuts, water would run to his fields, which sat at lower elevations. He described historic bridges that now lay fully embedded and buried in the accumulated sediment. Alluvial deposits had thus reached three or four meters deep.20 Deeply aggraded and raised stream channels of this sort were already found along the banks of the Río de San Juan, immediately south of the parish church, which facilitated the deep sedimentation in the village in the eighteenth century. The alluviation along the banks of the Zahuapan River in the eighteenth century, as described by de Portal, had been transported there from the upper basin. The environmental rupture and degradation responsible for this sediment release into the Zahuapan’s channel lay fully exposed in 1761. In the mid-reach of the Zahuapan River, roughly halfway between the headwaters of the Sierra Madre Oriental and Tlaxcala City, the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas haciendas became the site of a ten-day circumambulation (see map 20). The circumambulation exposed a total rupture of landscape and a profound degradation of soil and water that occurred suddenly and simultaneously shortly after

140

|

Chapter 4

1697. Following the remnants of a meandering wetland called Amalinalco, the entourage traveled four kilometers along the length of a dry ditch, formerly a wetland, until massive eskerlike ridges of sand suddenly interrupted the ditch and spread into the floodplain from the surrounding hillsides. Barren land dominated the valley except for a slip of grassland just to the south of the sand ridges. The property title did not mention the existence of the sand ridges, which were declared to be the Xalatlauhco Ravine. The entourage then advanced up the ravine toward the top of the hill known as Centzoncuauhtipan that bordered the floodplain.21 Once they had ascended the ravine, a full picture of the state of the environment started to emerge. Massive soil movements had taken much of the hill’s topsoil into the valley.22 Deciduous oaks had been replaced by alligator junipers, a drought-tolerant and fire-intolerant tree species.23 The midslopes had been utterly abandoned in recent decades. Sporadic maguey plants marked the outlines of what used to be metepantli, rows of maguey used to stabilize hillside terraces.24 The documents provide a rough timeline for the transformations. The point of reference for the entourage was the 1698 Posesión de Oropeza, meaning that any significant environmental changes had occurred after that time. The existence of long sand ridges (not present in the Posesión) indicates that very strong currents had predominated in the years shortly following 1698. Tellingly, by 1761, farmers had just broken new land at the base of the ravine and seeded it with barley. This indicates that the major sand and water flows had stopped, slowed, or found new outlets by then.25 Thus, between 1698 and 1761, the hillsides broke down, eroded, and moved into the floodplain, thereby infilling the marsh. At the western part of the circumambulations, along the Zahuapan River, they continued searching for the western bank of Atlancatepec Marsh. The crew found not a marsh but a river and floodplain continually interrupted by embankments one-half to two meters tall, some of them irrigation canals while others were past levees from the same Zahuapan River. The men noted that separate from the river channel was a barren, oval-shaped, mostly dry quagmire, the scant remnants of what used to be a thriving wetland. Near the town of Atlancatepec were the remnants of a bridge swept away sometime in the early eighteenth century, a small, periodically boggy area difficult, but not impossible, to cross by horse. Don Francisco de Nieto de Almizón, the owner of the estate named La Concepción de Zacatepec, insisted that the river itself had changed location because of “an impetuous torrent that made it lose its former channel.”26 The river had charted a new course to the east, creating “an elbow” that isolated the dry lake

Embedded Lives

|

141

bed to the west. The event occurred sometime between 1705 and 1761. Unfortunately for don Francisco, the entourage could not agree on the identification of the “Old Channel.” By 1761, the floodplain was littered with ridges. Not one of the men suspected that extensive wetlands had once existed when their lands were settled. The shifting torrent and the backswamps left in its wake had destroyed the bridges that sixty years earlier had allowed commercial traffic to pass to the north of the Atlancatepec Marsh. Now, in 1761, the road passed far to the south where the river proved more stationary. It is difficult to ascertain the approximate year in which the new Zahuapan River breached the Atlancatepec Marsh. A likely scenario is that these events occurred during the major flood events of either 1735–36 or in the three-year period from 1742 to 1744. Even if this estimation is correct, there is no reason to believe that this was the first lateral shift of the Zahuapan River’s channel in the now Atlancatepec floodplain. As noted, the inspection crew could not locate the “original” channel and found many channel-like ridges, all of which indicate that such lateral shifts had occurred many times before. Indeed, contraction and growth within the Tlaxcalan wetlands are excellent indicators of alluviation, providing clues to changes in the soil/water balance before flood frequency increases. While climate-induced dehumidification— retreating from the Colonial Mexican Pluvial—contributed to desiccation, alluviation was a critical factor. Evidence of the contraction and disappearance of the Atzompan Marsh emerges from land sales, rental agreements, and land titles. Whereas dozens of titles from 1580 until the 1660s describe the Aztompan Marsh as the boundary of estates, by the 1680s estates abutted the “Tlaxco River” and not the marsh.27 In 1684, the estate’s owner, don Joseph de Brito, employed indios from the nearby town of Tlaxco to install irrigation works and break earth in the area of the former marsh.28 The raised stream channel that cut through the marsh is confirmed by detailed maps from the early and mid-twentieth century. One such map from 1957 shows the Zahuapan River was elevated at least two meters above the surrounding floodplain and contained a pebble bed. Sometime prior to the creation of this map, significant fluvial forces had carried rough texture sediments across the floodplain. The same map revealed the Atzompan Spring and Marsh to be disconnected from the hydrological system, while the Atlantepetzinco Marsh had been fully elided from the landscape. In their place, rivers ran along the periphery of the topographical depressions and left the wetlands to languish without significant inputs of water.29 Other documents from the beginning of the twentieth century state

142

|

Chapter 4

clearly that the Zahuapan River channel was dry during the winter months and that significant alluvial fanning had taken place near San Miguel Payocan.30 These wetlands had played a critical role in reducing the likelihood of floods on the Zahuapan River at Tlaxcala City, acting as reservoirs that prevented both water and sediment from moving quickly downstream and effectively cushioning the blow of violent weather events. The mitigating capacity of this interconnecting series of wetlands was huge. Tlaxcala City’s watershed was 115,000 hectares. The wetlands of the northern Zahuapan River basin—the marshes of Santa Clara, Atlantepetzinco, and Atlancatepec—intercepted the flow of 43,000 hectares that lay upland of both the marshes and Tlaxcala City. This means that 37 percent of all water that flowed to Tlaxcala City passed through the wetlands of the northern Zahuapan River basin. From a geomorphological perspective, it makes sense that the Atzompan Marsh, which lay upstream of the Atlancatepec Marsh, disappeared first. Its replacement by a river permitted streams to flow unabated and to enter the lower Atlancatepec Marsh with increased energy. Following the formation of the new stream, the Zahuapan River increased its strength (from a fifth- to sixth-order stream) and newly brought sediment from two major floodplains and more than 44,000 hectares of land to Tlaxcala City’s floodplain. In contrast to prior conditions, by the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century, none of these wetlands significantly obstructed water or sediment from flowing quickly downstream to Tlaxcala City. The formation of a surface water course through the Atzompan and Atlantepetzinco Marshes constituted a fundamental breaking point of the early Zahuapan River system and exposed the Atlancatepec Marsh to enormous supplies of sediment and the energy to move this sediment. Applying the Strahler methodology of stream orders, the early colonial Tecomatla River appears as a fifth-order stream as it entered the Atlantepetzinco Marsh, and it brought sediment from an area of over twenty thousand hectares. The Tlachac River entered the Atzompan Marsh as a fourth-order stream and contributed sediment from about six thousand hectares of land. The rivers then combined and flowed intermittently as first- or second-order streams, eventually entering the Atlancatepec Marsh as a first-order stream. By way of comparison, the early colonial Zahuapan River as it flowed past Tlaxcala City was also a fifth-order stream. Excluding all those areas of the basin upstream of the Atlancatepec Marsh (i.e., all those where sediment stores were effectively withheld from downstream transport by the existence of floodplain depressions), the area that contributed sediment to the Tlaxcala City floodplain in the sixteenth century comprised only approximately

Embedded Lives

|

143

sixty-two thousand hectares. Thus, the Tlacomatla River had similar force to the Zahuapan River and a basin nearly one-third the size of that of Tlaxcala City. Simply put, an enormous energy and sediment potential lay latent behind the wetland depressions of the Atzompan and Atlantepetzinco Marshes. Let us now turn our attention to the situation in the Teotihuacán Valley, where substantial quantities of sediment had accumulated by the 1730s in the Acolman Dam reservoir. Alluviation was so severe that the convent and church of Acolman sit some three meters below the surrounding territory. Juan Joseph de Alva, a local indigenous elite from the area trained in surveying and architecture (maestro de alarife), noted about 2.5 meters of sediment between 1741 and 1762.31 This estimate was repeated many times by various witnesses in 1762.32 By the early 1740s, new land was being opened where the reservoir had once existed, and by 1769 the San Antonio Hacienda had, similarly, opened vast regions to wheat production. The new land, however, took much water for irrigation because when allowed to dry, deep cracks opened in the earth. Clearly this was alluvial clay sediments, described as de mucho migajón (very clayey).33 The same hacienda expanded yet again in 1780, claiming the “rights of alluvium” (derecho de aluvión).34 To some degree it is not surprising that the reservoir filled up with soil, although three meters is not a small quantity to explain away. Evidence of sedimentation in the wetlands in San Juan Teotihuacán (figure 17) strongly supports the sediment record (both depth and timing) in the Acolman Dam reservoir seen directly above. The first inundation of the town by the Río de San Juan was in 1772 when, as noted before, San Juan’s main church was flooded so severely that bodies were disinterred from the church patio and brought downstream. Salvage archaeological reports tell us that the river had been aggrading its stream and had developed a stream channel raised above the surrounding land (see A on map 18).35 Even today, walking from the church to the river (about two hundred meters), the land rises about three meters. At letter B on map 18 was situated the colonial market square (tianguiz), abandoned in the late colonial era, which salvage reports show to be under 2.5–3.0 meters of sediment deposited by the Río de San Juan. Some parts were below more than 3.6 meters.36 A modern road (C) runs directly through the extinct and forgotten wetland in San Juan. Excavations in 2008 revealed this road (built sometime after 1865) to be on top of one meter of soil deposited alluvially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.37 Finally, excavations revealed depths of colonial and post-colonial alluvium of up to five meters at the main church in San Juan and of up to three meters at the Puxtla church.38 Again, because the first reported flood in San Juan by the Río de San Juan occurred in 1772, we

144

|

Chapter 4

FIGURE 17 Approximate sedimentation in the reservoir of Acolman Dam. Ground-level elevations measured with handheld Garmin GPS device in November 2012. For illustration purposes, the scale of the vertical dimension is about twenty-three times greater than the horizontal.

MAP 18 Map of San Juan Teotihuacán (1865). can refine the archaeological dates and surmise that all of the above-mentioned sedimentation happened after that late-colonial date. Wetlands in the Teotihuacán Valley are, unfortunately, too few and too small to indicate the hydrological health in the valley, which was the methodology followed in researching the Zahuapan River basin. The Teotihuacán Valley receives less precipitation and has much higher rates of evapotranspiration than Tlaxcala, leaving few areas with standing water. The only significant wetlands were

Embedded Lives

|

145

TABLE 3 Historical output of natural springs in San Juan Teotihuacán. Year 1584 1684 1715 1756 1783 1917 1926 1955–58 1965 1970s 1991–2012

Amount

Type of Measurement

18.5 surcos 32 surcos 48, 58, or 75 surcos A significant increase A significant reduction 1,000– 1,500 L/sec 588.6 L/sec 523 L/sec Reduction in flow A significant reduction Dry

Measured Measured Measured Estimate Estimate Estimate Measured Measured Estimate Estimate Oral testimony (2010– 12)

AGN Tierras: Proceedings between Tepexpan, fols. 17v– 28v, 32v– 36v; and Towns of San Juan and Maquixco, fol. 23r; AHSJT Aguas, Teotihuacán against Hacienda de San José Acolman; Gamio, Población, vol. 2, “Quinta parte: La población contemporánea,” 87; AHA Aprovechamientos Superficiales, Regarding the conflict, fol. 469r; Sanders, Cultural Ecology, 44; Lorenzo, “Clima y agricultura,” 60; Nieves et al., “Tour of Ahuehuetes and Springs.”

located in San Juan Teotihuacán, at the site of the natural springs, and they were miniscule in area compared with the great wetlands of Atzoman and Atlancatepec. The hydrography of the valley, then, meant that these small wetlands were poor proxies of soil erosion. Nevertheless, their historical importance meant that stream flow was carefully measured at various times during the colonial era. Table 3 shows the variations over time of this output. What stands out in the various measurements is that the river’s volume increased at least threefold from the sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, and perhaps fivefold. By the late eighteenth century, the flow had fallen off substantially. Once again, just as we saw in Tlaxcala, the timing of sedimentation and changing volume from the springs matches the chronology of the new flood regime.

Silt and Politics The Spanish governor of the colonial province of Tlaxcala, Francisco de Lissa, complained to Spanish king Carlos III in 1787 that the Zahuapan River was

146

|

Chapter 4

impeding good governance and had made a wretched mess of his ever-loyal and once-great polity: There is nothing better known in this new and old world than the opulence of

Tlaxcala, independent of all its neighbors and respected for its struggle against its irreconcilable enemy the Mexican empire and there is today no more authentic testament to its lamentable ruin than to see its government buildings almost completely washed away by the frequent floods of the Zahuapan River.39

An earlier version of Lissa’s text, written in 1785, noted that three-quarters of the city had been laid to waste by the city’s “greatest enemy . . . the voluminous river that passes nearby called the Zahuapan.” The author of the 1785 text remembered a first catastrophe in 1713 when 116 houses washed away, leaving many inhabitants to drown, and a second in 1721 when a popular park known as El Cielo de la Zagala (Maiden’s Heaven)—that the author described as a promenade filled with flowers and fruit trees—was leveled by a torrent that flooded the main streets and left ruin in its wake. The second event was particularly bad because of an earthquake nearly simultaneous with flood that split the earth and diverted water into new channels. After 1721, the city’s struggle against this fluvial beast became less sensational and more despairing: a tale of frequent destruction and progressive colonization of the urban grid by water, wetlands, and aquatic wildlife. Salamanders were said to be overrunning the city! An important church collapsed, bridges were swept away, the main plazas and roads were frequently under water, and the governor’s house was undercut by the force of water and deemed unsafe and ordered destroyed. While the province financed new bridges, retaining walls along the river, dredging and cleaning of channels, and the erection of dikes and levees, these efforts did little to set straight the errant stream. Thus, buildings such as the church and hermitage of San Francisco were abandoned and moved to another city. Taxes were imposed on woolen textiles (a mainstay of the Tlaxcala economy) to pay for reparations, which had minimal effect on the river and still forced producers out of the province and into nearby cities such as Puebla and Mexico City. One solution was to think big, to apply engineering techniques to simple problems, as was being done in Mexico City (with virtually no success) with regard to the viceregal capital’s monumental drainage project. Engineering plans were drawn up shortly after 1763, then again in the 1780s, and finally, when the

Embedded Lives

|

147

plans were lost and could not be located, yet again in 1793. The last of these plans recommended a highly elaborate and ambitious project to divert the river into a new channel flowing through the center of a nearby hill, which required not only the excavation of the hill, but also digging a new channel, erecting a tall kilometer-long retaining wall and building a new bridge. Even if the plan could work (and there was good reason to doubt its success), who would pay for it? At the time of Lissa’s letter, seven years of moving earth had passed with little evidence of progress. As the project stalled, funds ran dry, and renewed floods ravaged the city in 1793. Acrimonious debate broke out, especially between the newest proponent of the ambitious plan, engineer don Joseph Rodríguez Bayon, and Governor Lissa, who ultimately rejected the subterranean plan, preferring a simple and cost-effective cleaning and excavation of the existing channel. Bayon’s position—presented in two letters to the viceroy—was that an excavation of the existing channel would be useless because renewed flooding would simply aggrade the riverbed. Indeed, dredging and cleaning of the existing channel bed had been the focus of nearly a century of failed reparation projects. Indeed, going further he argued that Lissa’s limited plan would be an irresponsible and immoral use of backbreaking indigenous labor used to clean and dredge the channel. Lissa fired back, claiming that Bayon’s foolish plan was the product of, on the one hand, the engineer’s own ignorance and simplicity, and on the other, of misguided advice from a local landowner (don Fernando Ruíz), whom Lissa disparaged as a perpetual and insubstantial chatterbox, wanting to fix the whole universe and entertain idle thoughts, expounding discourses that, to [Ruíz’s] ear, qualify him

as erudite when in fact he is a deluded ignoramus, just like the author of both letters [i.e., don Joseph Bayon].40

As to the question of wasting indigenous lives in the morass of the riverbed, the Spanish governor responded cold-heartedly, declaring that the suffering of a few indios should not be allowed to impede the progress of the province and the benefit of the community at large. Besides, he said, “Jesus will thank them!” Viceregal officials quickly sided with Lissa’s low-cost plan, replaced Bayon with “engineer extraordinaire” don Juan Camargo Caballero, and—according to the disgraced engineer’s heart-wrenching letters written in his own defense—left Bayon a dishonored and professionally ruined man. Even though provincial

148

|

Chapter 4

officials claimed some limited success, in 1806, in curbing damages with continued dredging and “felling of trees, bushes and brush,” the same problem remained in 1866.41 Downstream of Tlaxcala, the town of Nativitas was plagued by the unpredictable currents of the Zahuapan, which swept away bridges, flooded nearby land, and made impassible the principal roadway to and from town—the camino real that connected Tlaxcala City with Puebla City. The problem was first discussed in 1733 and went unresolved for decades, with new makeshift bridges carried away by recurrent floods in subsequent years. Town officials fought with wealthy Spanish landowners (hacendados) for funds to dredge canals and rebuild the bridge. The town’s pleas for help highlighted the indignation and immorality wrought by the river: having to ask permission of wealthy Spaniards to bypass the river via private estates; losing mules and cargo in the torrent; risking their lives to ford the torrent on the way to church and market. There was the case, in 1757, when the swollen river disgraced a group of pall bearers, forcing them to strip nearly naked to ford the torrent and nearly costing one man his life when he lost his footing. Similarly, in 1782, town officials recounted the dishonor brought to its women who carried their clothing above their heads as they forded the Zahuapan. The message to the colonial administrators to whom provincial and town officials made their cases was that the river had the potential to be a dangerous and immoral force in public life.

Silt and Agriculture In the Teotihuacán Valley, a parallel history had been unfolding. Floods had become more frequent and more destructive over an ever-increasing area, from the dam site all the way upstream to the village of San Juan Teotihuacán. Over the course of the eighteenth century between three and four meters of alluvium settled in the valley, causing the Río de San Juan to shift from one channel to another (i.e., stream avulsion, just as the Zahuapan had done at the same time in the Atlancatepec Marsh). Local communities responded and adapted to the aggraded valley lands. Success at adaptation varied greatly from one social group to another, certainly by class, ethnicity, and geographic location (especially relative to the dam site— above or below the dam, or within or peripheral to the reservoir), but also by the choice of strategies and tactics employed in increasing or protecting rights to

Embedded Lives

|

149

land and water. It would be hard to characterize the process as “collaborative” or as cross-ethnic rapprochement, as had been found in other parts of central Mexico.42 Instead, the examples from the Acolman Dam watershed show us that dynamic silt and water brought groups into conflict—debating, litigating, vandalizing, and even raising arms to advance a particular cause. The floods had reached disastrous proportions already in the 1730s and 1740s. As the sediment accumulated in the dam’s reservoir, local interests shifted as each group decided how best to capitalize on, or minimize the effects of, the changing conditions. The cabecera of Acolman moved quickly to colonize parts of the reservoir as they became available for cultivation. It should be noted, however, that their water rights were minuscule compared to others in the watershed, such as the Jesuit Hacienda de San Antonio, which we will examine shortly, and amounted to no more than two surcos, shared between the town of Xometla (dependency of Acolman until 1745), the convent of Acolman (which had a small orchard and some adjacent lands for cultivation), and the more central towns of El Calvario and Santa Catarina. The town of Santiago Atlatongo, another dependency of Acolman, possessed rights to an independent source of water called El Tular, while yet another small quantity of water was allotted to Xometla for cleaning the main canal and for repairs to the Acolman Dam.43 Cultivating these newly opened lands took much care and, even with such attention, was a risky venture. The years between 1732 and 1736—nearly all of which saw major flooding in the surrounding communities—did not produce a single successful harvest of either maize or wheat.44 A report to the audiencia of the situation in 1736 noted the profound damage brought by the floods: Although pointing out to them the said damages and other that are notorious and patent and that they will not end here but in even greater damages, and as

such the floodwaters have left the church of the cabecera, which is completely

exposed, in total ruin, and washes away men, animals, and houses, leaving behind those people— pitiful, but safe— who can find safety in tree canopies while its furious waters pass, all because it does not have sufficient channel, and

for four years it has spilled across many areas with the force and rising level of the waters, and has left behind in these affected areas considerable passageways [portillos, i.e., new channels] that lead to such pitiful inundations.45

The report noted the difficulty in obtaining funds or labor from local inhabitants, even when they were directly and negatively affected by the surging

150

|

Chapter 4

water. The floods of 1740 inflicted perhaps the worst damage thus suffered by the community of Acolman, ruining as much as 12,000 pesos worth of wheat.46 This latest crisis finally drove the community to agree to help remedy the situation by creating five separate cadres—each representative of two or three different dependencies of Acolman—that would each trench a 17 × 210 meter section (20 × 250 varas) of a new channel for the Río de San Juan.47 While the new canal seemed to have made the situation more manageable in the coming decades, this success brought with it, on the one hand, new opportunities for agrarian expansion in the reservoir and, on the other, renewed social conflict between competing factions in the town. The cabecera town of Acolman fought tenaciously for the rights to these small quantities of water, an important point of dissension that ultimately drove the residents of Xometla to separate from Acolman in 1745. The acrimony between the towns, however, did not end with secession. Between 1750 and 1753, farmers from Xometla and Acolman competed for the water, each side setting out in the dead of night to build makeshift dams made of sand, rubble, brush (cespedes), or adobe, which then diverted the water to newly trenched canals more favorable to one or the other town. Often, the first step to establishing such ad hoc irrigation works involved destroying the existing works created by the opposing town. While each town claimed immemorial rights to the water, it appears that their allotment was established only in 1684 and that the lands to which they diverted water in the 1740s and 1750s were all new. Elders from the communities (all seventy-five to eighty-five years of age in 1753), noted that this had previously been a wetland. For instance, eighty-year-old Jacinto Ruiz, a Spaniard from San Juan Teotihuacán, testified that “the entire valley that today the indios of Acolman are cultivating and seeding was a wetland and tular [marshland covered in bulrushes] where there were very deep wells such that to get to some houses that were in [the town of ] El Calvario it was necessary to move by canoe, and with the floodwaters of the river it has all been filled with sediment.”48 While the conflict between Xometla and Acolman shows how the transformed landscape (whose form was structured by the Acolman Dam) caused riches to be found and tensions to rise in indigenous communities, a second example shows similar results between Spanish estates. The Jesuits had two major property holdings in the area: one (Hacienda de San José), located north of the reservoir and directly west of the town of Atlatongo, had substantial rights to land and water, while the other (Hacienda de San Antonio), located

Embedded Lives

|

151

at the southwestern edge of the reservoir had, by 1740, purchased enormous quantities of land and rights to water emanating from the springs in San Juan Teotihuacán. The San Antonio hacienda had expanded rapidly, buying neighboring haciendas in 1729–30 and two-thirds of the potrero of Acolman in 1730, the other part divided between the Augustinians of the convent of Acolman and the town of Acolman.49 The purchase of the potrero showed particular forethought, because this property, like that of the Hacienda de San Antonio itself, bordered the dam reservoir. When new land opened in the alluviated and drained reservoir, the Jesuits claimed the legal right to colonize these new lands (again, by means of el derecho de aluvión) because they owned adjacent land.50 For the Hacienda de San Antonio, the Acolman Dam had (mostly) outlived its original purpose. The Jesuits insisted that the dam no longer protected the Ciudad de México—and went so far as to say that it probably never did serve such purpose—and that maintaining the integrity of the structure simply made difficult the cultivation of the alluviated reservoir. Like the towns of Acolman and Xometla, the Jesuits focused on the most reliable cash crop: wheat. The wheat varieties planted in colonial Mexico were slow-maturing winter crops, planted in December or January, and harvested, ideally, before the onset of summer rainfall in June. This meant that strong and early summer showers—or a late harvest because of colder and wetter weather in the spring months— could expose ripening crops to excessive humidity and thereby cause grains to rot. The Hacienda de San Antonio noted that the key to successfully farming the reservoir was copious amounts of water applied to well-drained soils. This meant that not only did it require rights to water, but permission to drain the reservoir in the autumn before seeding while reserving the right to keep the floodgates open until the crops were harvested. Indeed, while further alluviation and summer flooding would fertilize the fields before planting, soil fertility was not an issue in these new soils and the risk from flooding greatly outweighed the potential benefits. Indeed, after the Jesuits were exiled in 1767 and their estates fell into the hands of Crown-appointed administrators, the new mayordomo requested (and was quickly denied) the key for the Castillo of the dam (i.e., the gate).51 Long before 1767, however, Jesuit administrators did not hesitate to take matters into their own hands by knocking down large sections of the dam to let water flow past.52 Not only did these new apertures empty the reservoir, but they effectively rerouted most of the streamflow emanating from the San Juan springs far to the east of the Castillo, meaning that estate owners and towns who possessed water

152

|

Chapter 4

rights immediately downstream (i.e., the Hacienda de San Miguel Coyotepec, the Hacienda de los Rincones, and the town of Tepexpan) could neither access the water nor irrigate lands. As to the timing of these changes, it appears that the dam had been vandalized and rendered ineffective well before the 1740 court case and even before the expansion in 1729–30 of the San Antonio estate. Indeed, a map from 1727 (figure 18) shows three or four separate channels passing through the dam, only one of which entered the Castillo and compuerta complex. The two openings alluded to in this map—one just to the east of the Castillo and the other far to the east, not quite shown on the map—are actually the same apertures mentioned thirteen years later in the 1740 court case noted above. As is the case with all such changes in the land, there was an unintended beneficiary of this diversion of water—the town of Cuanalan, which then expanded the scope of irrigated lands, although this strained relations between the neighboring Tepexpan and propelled the two towns into litigation in 1727.53 Figure 18 shows the terrain in dispute in this case. Seven years later, in 1747, official viceregal inspectors—led by Joseph Francisco de Cuevas Aguirre y Espinosa—returned to the dam following the floods in Mexico City the previous year. De Cuevas found the dam in the same dilapidated condition as described in 1740, with the largest gap equaling one hundred varas. Most interesting, however, is Cuevas’s description of the downstream side of the dam: “The exterior wall that faces south, contiguous with the towns of Cuanalan and Tepexpan, has been impeded by not only a multitude of various types of trees, but with houses of the natives of these towns, for which the dam serves as a wall.”54 Contemporary maps, such as that shown in figure 18, omit this multitude of trees and houses that backed against the dam and no doubt encouraged its deterioration and depict instead only a small number of trees—primarily the long-lived ahuehuetes—and a vast quantity of magueys with significant economic value to local citizens. Land and people, it seems, had quickly adapted to the changing landscape created by siltation and vandalism. De Cuevas, reporting for the viceroy (i.e., with the best interests of the capital in mind and preferring conservative recommendations), strongly supported the renovation of this “magnificent construction,” which would cost five thousand pesos and be finished by 1750. De Cuevas ensured that funds would be allotted not only for renovating the physical structure of the dam, but also for compensation for the houses that were forcibly removed from the backside of the wall. Yet hostilities between upstream and downstream users only worsened after renovations were completed in 1750. In September, just days after the

FIGURE 18 Map of Juan del Campo Velarde showing townland of Tepexpan, Cuanalan, and river and dam (1727). AGN Tierras, Town of Cuanalan, vol. 2515, exp. 1, fol. 76. Archivo General de la Nación, #1477.

154

|

Chapter 4

renovations on the dam were complete, a major storm event destroyed the gate and piled deep sediment around the dam.55 Over the next two years, portions of the dam were once again knocked down.56 By 1758, the downstream haciendas resumed their complaints that they could no longer access the water they legally claimed.57 The dam gate was not repaired until 1770, but this only worsened the flooding, sending water over top of the dam, which reportedly undermined the base of the wall. The worsening crisis—for those downstream and, as we will see, for the convent of Acolman—motivated downstream users to advance the idea of adding an extra half-vara of height to the wall, a plan never attempted.58

Silt, Religion, and Rebellion As the silt mounded and floodwaters worsened, the problems became even more grievous, culminating in a dispute between the riverine community of Acolman and the local priest of the Augustinian convent in Acolman. The conflict began in 1762 and quickly required intervention by the viceregal authorities and the archbishop. The proceedings climaxed in 1766 when indigenous townsfolk led a successful local revolt first against the local priest and, when that failed, against the viceregal militia. The problem for which the community demanded redress was the plan initiated by the local priest, bachelor don Juan de Dios Martínez de Viana, to move the seat of the parish and cabecera (the local political-administrative center) from Acolman to the neighboring and rival town of Santa María Magdalena Tepexpan. According to Martínez’s own testimony, moving the parish would rectify a long-standing problem: the church and convent were being flooded with increasing frequency. Indeed, many twentieth-century historians and other scholars have identified the construction of a dam along the Río de San Juan in 1630 as the cause of flooding of the church and convent, which were built a century before on the same floodplain as the dam. To a certain extent they are right. The dam’s reservoir could indeed inundate a large portion of the lower valley, but such events did not begin in earnest until 1732, more than a hundred years after construction.59 Moreover, the convent was fifteen hundred meters upstream (to the north) of the dam and was often flooded not from the waters of the reservoir, but by the river itself. In 1762, the water rose about sixty-five centimeters (three-quarters of a vara) in the church and at least twice that amount in the cloisters. The confessionals floated out of the church “despite

Embedded Lives

|

155

their weight, as though they were buoys,” and bodies were disinterred from the church’s patio. While the town and the priest seemed to agree on the frequency of the floods, they differed over their severity and the possibility of coping with them. The town brought forth witnesses to testify that flooding was not, in fact, very common. In living memory, only one incident could be recalled of a similar magnitude: the flood of 1736. The priest actually agreed with this statement, but noted that the floods “need not arrive more than one or more times for it to be a danger,” adding that he “barely escaped” with his life.60 The priest refused to withdraw his proposal and soon moved the parish to Tepexpan. In making their arguments, the two sides supported their cases with maps that represented the hydrological conditions of the valley. The two images could not have been more different. The priest’s version, figure 19, makes effective use of monochromatic ink to show the river breaching the channel banks and spilling into the church’s environs. The map indicates three breaks (roturas) of the channel of the Río de San Juan, suggesting that the situation was beyond reparations. The town of El Calvario is shown completely surrounded by water. Only the town of Santa Catarina—where the opposing natives lived, mainly— remained free of harm from the river. In figure 20 we see a very different hydrological context. It is not clear if the natives of Acolman painted this handsome image themselves or commissioned the work. Regardless, the landscape depicted reflects their interests: the hydrology of the lower valley was safe and idyllic. Indeed, the image depicts a productive, prosperous, and well-kept landscape. Despite the cleverness of the town’s image, it could not do the work of a threat of physical violence. The population of Acolman resisted the priest’s actions by threatening his life and then chasing him out of town. The situation remained stable and relatively calm, however, until word arrived that the priest planned to relocate a number of sacred objects from the church to Tepexpan. Hearing this, the villagers claimed that they would sooner have the priest killed than allow Tepexpan to possess their sacred belongings. Not heeding threats, the priest started to carry out an inventory of the objects. As he and his helpers finished their work, women from Acolman entered the church, forcing him to leave empty-handed, pursued by six hundred men from Acolman, throwing rocks from the other side of the canal. Enraged by the cleric’s actions and the dispossession of the sacred objects, the townsfolk emptied the church and convent of its remaining contents and stored them in the tequicalco (administrative offices), a place the priest described pejoratively as “where they [the indios] hold

FIGURE 19 The lower Teotihuacán Valley as depicted by an Acolman priest (1762). The drawing illustrates the grave danger posed by the water to the Convento de Acolman. The map reads: “Por el mes de septiembre del año pasado de 1762, se experimentó la inundacion de la Iglesia de Acolman en este modo; asi por q[ue] la presa empujo las aguas: como por [h]averse rompido el rio.” [In the month of September of last year, 1762, the flood of the Acolman Church occurred in this way; as such because the dam pushed [back against] the waters, as though the river had broken.] Drawn by Juan de Dios Martínez de Viana, cura propio y juez eclesiástico de Acolman, 43.3 × 33 cm. Archivo General de la Nación, #4750.1. AGN Bienes Nacionales, Regarding the flooding, fols. 29r– 46v.

towns, well-managed waterworks, and a generally idyllic countryside. Painted or commissioned by natives of Acolman, 43 × 47 cm. Archivo General de la Nación, #4750. AGN Bienes Nacionales, Regarding the flooding, fols. 29r– 46v.

FIGURE 20 The lower Teotihuacán Valley as depicted by natives of Acolman (1763). The map shows stately churches and

158

|

Chapter 4

their drunken binges,” adding that “there could not be a worse place for such sacred objects.”61 Over the course of the next two weeks the uprising was first pacified by a special troop of soldiers formed by the viceroy and then successfully mediated by the dean of the Metropolitan Church in Mexico City, who ordered the objects and the priest to return to Acolman. Humiliated, the priest said that he “was viewed poorly by the indios,” and, besides, he was too ill to return. Even though priest and parish were quickly ordered back to Acolman, services were rarely held in the historic building. In the last fifty years of colonial rule, the sixteenth-century structure flooded eleven times, forcing the town to build a new church on higher ground.

The Chinampas Project of 1818 During a brief hiatus in Mexico’s war of independence, and at the end of the dry season of 1818 before the annual monsoon rains would once again bloat the wetlands and rivers of the central Mexican highlands, villagers from San Juan Teotihuacán sunk their legs into the mucky terrain immediately below the village’s main church (see map 19). They first felled a forest savannah of the great ahuehuetes (also known in Spanish as sabino and in English as Montezuma bald cypress—Taxodium mucronatum) and then took up the arduous task of carving out ditches from the wetland and mounding the soil into long rectangular cultivation platforms that they called camellones.62 After the trees were removed, ditches dug, and camellones formed, much work remained for the villagers. Willows and other trees were planted around the periphery of the plots and, most importantly, dams, diversion mechanisms, and sluice gates were installed. Finally, the everyday work of full-time year-round cultivation began. According to the villagers’ testimony later that year, they had sought to “make chinampas” (construir chinampas), a colossal undertaking that ultimately extended across as many as fifty hectares.63 As the ahuehuetes fell and the platforms rose from the wetland, the project was halted by the court at the behest of the Jesuit order, which possessed an agricultural estate immediately downstream of the village with substantial rights to water for irrigation. The Jesuits—recently returned from their expulsion from the Spanish Empire—sought to stop the project on the grounds that it would reduce the overall volume of water in the river system and thereby infringe on their water rights. While the documentation of the litigation is incomplete and

MAP 19 San Juan Teotihuacán chinampas. The extent of the chinampas is derived from both satellite imagery and the Millon maps. Millon, Teotihuacán Map; INEGI ortofoto digital, E14B21B3, 1:40,000, March 2005.

160

|

Chapter 4

lacks the court’s sentencing, we know the outcome. Sometime after 1818, the risky, complex, labor-intensive, and contentious chinampas project began to operate as intended, with a massive payoff for the town. The installation and maintenance of this intensive agricultural system resulted in some of the most fertile lands in central Mexico, enabling a market-garden scheme that supplied food to downstream cities, especially Mexico City, less than fifty kilometers to the southwest. Driving the impulse to litigate in 1818 was the Jesuits’ fear of growing aridity. Citing a variety of important thinkers, the Jesuits had argued that the ahuehuetes had facilitated the movement of water from subterranean reservoirs to the surface via the springs. The felling of these trees, by extension, desiccated the springs and downstream land.64 The theory that linked deforestation with desiccation was very much in vogue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, disseminated in Mexico in the 1780s and 1790s by the great polymath José Antonio Alzate Ramírez. While the villagers rejected the premise of desiccation theory—calling it “a very vulgar and popular belief ”—they did not dispute the growing aridity.65 Teotihuacán rejected the logic of desiccation theory and, instead, argued that intense fires deep in the earth drove humidity to the surface. They suggested that conditions had been growing drier since the 1770s and 1780s, when the town began investing in canal improvements, took charge of the cleaning of the springs, and built their own water-powered grist mill. Output from the springs began to fall after the 1750s and became a problem by 1783, the last year of the colonial era in which spring volume was estimated. Historical hydrological and climatic data suggest that change in groundwater discharge in the valley lags precipitation trends by approximately forty to fifty years. Thus, it is likely that the acknowledged water deficit was still significant in 1818. By these same decades, the lake system around Mexico City (into which the waters from Teotihuacán drained) had fully desiccated in many parts. Desiccation reached maximum levels during the Year of Hunger in 1785 and 1786 (the driest back-to-back years on record in the last five hundred years), when falling groundwater levels in the chinampa zone on the eastern edges of Mexico City (at Iztacalco) spurred strong capillary action, drawing salts to the surface and contaminating chinampa soils, a process called atequesquitar, or alkalizar. At the height of the famine, when bodies were weak and sick, farmers excavated and hauled away the top forty centimeters of newly salinated soil from their fields.66 Tambora arrived at a very bad time for Mexicans. Drought in 1808 and then cold, damp conditions in 1809–10 (which followed another significant volcanic

Embedded Lives

|

161

eruption) resulted in very poor harvests. The outbreak of war in 1810 disrupted markets for the next five years, a situation that was made much worse when harvests were decimated by effects of Tambora’s eruption in 1815. This made for a decade of hard times, for obtaining enough food and for those whose crops were either too difficult to get to market or just failed to grow as expected, not to mention the active warfare, looting, and arson that ravaged many highland communities, especially around Teotihuacán. Historian Eric Van Young describes Teotihuacán as one of a few “important theaters of military activity for most of the insurrectionary period.” Some of the most important battles took place upstream of Teotihuacán, near the town of Otumba, between royalists (whom Teotihuacán supported) and the insurgents funded by the owners of the great pulque estates operating in the region. Its position as a royalist outpost on the fringe of the greatest sites of insurrection meant that it was a consistent target for rebels. In August 1811, it fell to a force of well-armed rebels who burned its archives. Its pulque industry—one of two primary economic engines for the town—was in tatters, squeezed between royalist authorities in Mexico City who feared that pulque might draw the townsfolk back into the hands of the rebels and, on the other side, insurgents who had been attacking competitors in the Teotihuacán region as retaliation for their support of royalists.67 Amid this chaos, Teotihuacán initiated the chinampa project, driven by a number of factors: high food prices, the loss of the village’s pulque industry, favor with the ruling government, proximity to Mexico City markets, a steady water supply, and the presence of untapped fertile soils. In crisis could come fortune, at least for those in the right place, at the right time, and with the right plan. In the villagers’ testimony of 1818, it is pointed out that the single most important cause of the diminished flow from the springs was that the Río de San Juan—which is not naturally connected to the chinampa zone nor to the springs, but flows immediately to the south, just a few hundred meters away— had been overspilling its banks and depositing deep layers of sediment over top of the springs and thereby obstructing them, in-filling the town’s wetland, and reducing flow downstream. In no uncertain terms, the villagers declared: Everyone knows the force of the water that comes precipitated from the mountaintops, bringing stones, silt, and clay that go tearing everything away with

its current. . . . The first floodwaters . . . actually uncover more springs in their path, but at the same time they leave the openings of the springs wider, such that they can receive great amounts of water and silt that are brought in greater

162

|

Chapter 4

abundance with the second floodwaters, and they silt up the springs, little by little, until perhaps plugging them up completely.68

The first indications of these deep alluvial deposits occurred about one hundred years prior, in 1720, when the Jesuits—before their expulsion from the Spanish Empire—hired locals to clean alluvium from canals and, especially, the springs. The town’s outdoor market site, located a stone’s throw from the river, was abandoned due to alluviation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to four meters of unwanted sedimentation was delivered from the upper basin to the town. The flood of 1772 was so powerful that it swept away soil from the town cemetery, disinterred bodies, and carried them downstream. Undeniably, the Teotihuacán chinampa project of 1818 was a remarkable community achievement, highlighting the brilliant foresight, planning, and execution of a large-scale environmental engineering project. In fact, until recently, some archaeologists associated this technical and hydrological marvel with the great classical era city of Teotihuacán (ca. 100–650 CE), lauded for its sophisticated architecture and urban planning.69 In that period the city had both the means and need to carry out such a large-scale environmental engineering project. The discovery of the 1818 document casts much doubt on that argument and opens new questions about how local indigenous imperial subjects—lacking the usual avenues of power and knowledge that enabled other grand engineering schemes such as the drainage of the lakes surrounding Mexico City— could adeptly handle a project of such technical and hydrological complexity.70 Admittedly, the scale of the desagüe and the chinampas are quite different— the former was one of the most ambitious projects of the seventeenth century, anywhere in the world—but the comparison is still apt given that both projects faced similar technical difficulties to conceptualize and implement a new morphology of land and a radically different flow and distribution of water. In both cases, the new land-water relationship was a delicate balance, although only the Teotihuacanos succeeded in both the short and long term.

Conclusion Returning, for a moment, to the amojonamiento of 1703, it is possible to see this dispute as a precocious precursor to what would follow. The dry riverbeds, the livestock deaths, the push to cultivate soils that had—at least since the

Embedded Lives

|

163

beginning of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial—been too wet to cultivate, and the intensified social conflict that occurred in this rural landscape: these were the early signs of the birth of a new hydrology and geomorphology. In the next few years, the Cabildo of Tlaxcala launched the first of many protracted investigations into the Zahuapan River. Over the next few decades, the silt, sand, and gravels made their way into the valleys and floodplains below. In fact, the central cause of this conflict (the ecology of new forms of maguey cultivation and the grazing lands of the Ejidos) stared down on the group that followed the Spanish gobernador and townsfolk’s indefatigable lawyer around the perimeter of the low-lying parcel. Yet it is unlikely that the group of officials who participated in the amojonamiento of 1703 recognized the underlying forces that had recently transformed this landscape. Of course, this complex social world cannot be reduced to a kneejerk reaction to the great forces of nature. That has not been the point of pairing environmental and social processes in this chapter. As historian Mark Morris reminds us, local resentment of the high-handed and corrupt politics of the Tlaxcalan provincial Cabildo had been brewing for decades. “Increasingly ineffectual and corrupt, the Cabildo’s elite nobility turned more spokesmen for colonial authority than servants of their altepetl and became impotent against colonial demands for land, labor, and capital.”71 Similarly, in the Teotihuacán Valley, the local uprising against the parish priest was driven by a multitude of factors, including Acolman’s acrimonious relationship with the neighboring town of Tepexpan and the desire of priests to be closer to the social orb of Spaniards, creoles, and sophisticated urbanites.72 Yet the terrain of everyday life was, undeniably, shifting, and lives were too deeply embedded in these lands and waters to not be altered by the changing environment. Responses, nevertheless, were creative and voluntary. While the 1703 amojonamiento—like the acts of sabotage and rebellion in Teotihuacán or the riparian politics in Tlaxcala—was not a matter of life or death, it was in some ways an opportunity and in others an unsettling hazard. Either way, it often could not be ignored, rousing rivalries and propelling action. Representatives from the pueblos and the Cabildo staked their ground and planned their next moves, but they did not act in desperation. As these short stories tell us, not only were the mundane affairs of agriculture knee-deep in dirt, but so too were politics and even religion. The unprecedented movement of water and soil in the eighteenth century was of concern to multiple ethnicities and classes, across many social spheres, and many valleys in central Mexico.

164

|

Chapter 4

Mexico’s eighteenth century is rightly seen as turbulent and conflictive. Historians have even linked the violence and conflict to environmental factors, most often growing resource scarcity resulting from demographic growth and inequitable distribution of ecological capital.73 Others have implicated drought as a primary driver of resource scarcity, which then drove social unrest. In certain times and places, these factors might have been very disruptive. Yet the stories recounted here—from the amojonamiento to the chinampa project of 1818—invoke a previously unidentified driver, a basal undercurrent of change: a hydrological regime change of nearly implausible proportions. Reaching depths of four meters and leaving deep scars on hillsides that can still be located in central Mexico’s craggy wastelands, mass soil movements upended the status quo.

CHAPTER 5

Memories of a Devious Landscape The Commissioner’s Report of 1761

O

n the morning of August 26, 1761, doctor don Nuño Núñez de Villavicencio, a commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, left the residences of the Hacienda de Cuamancingo estate, located in central Tlaxcala. He began his journey at the base of a low-lying hill and on the flat terrain beside the Arroyo de Tliliuhquitepec that descended from the eponymous hill to the north. About five kilometers to the east of the estate, the Arroyo de Tliliuhquitepec flowed into the Zahuapan River, then known as the Río de Atlancatepec. Map 20 shows the sites of parts of the commissioner’s circumambulation. Villavicencio was equipped with reams of historical land titles dated from 1534 to 1753, a compass, a notary to record the findings, an interpreter to translate from Nahuatl (the local indigenous language) to Spanish, and an entourage comprising informants and interested persons, mainly representatives of the properties that surrounded the Cuamancingo estate and the neighboring estate named Hacienda de Río de las Vacas.1 Together, the owners of these two estates (don Alejandro Muñoz de Cote and don Luis Athanacio Gil, respectively) owed 8,500 pesos to the royal treasury of the Inquisition for a loan issued in 1697.2 Of all the documents carried by the commissioner, the most important was a land title notarized in 1698, known as the “posesión de Oropeza,” which set the baseline from which the 1761 landscape had deviated. Indeed, the purpose of the inspection was to reset the boundaries of the two estates in accordance with the Oropeza title. Neighbors had contested the boundaries of

166

|

Chapter 5

MAP 20 Sites of Villavicencio’s circumambulation, 1761. the estate on the north, east, south, and west—that is, at every possible turn of the property line. To settle these disputes and secure the financial solvency of the estate (i.e., to ensure the repayment of the loan), the commissioner carried out a visual inspection of the estate’s perimeter. This chapter uses Commissioner Villavicencio’s report to explore memory and remembrance in the wake of climate-induced environmental catastrophe between 1698 and 1761. At the heart of the chapter are cognitive gymnastics, self-delusional interpretations, and outright forgeries that were needed—or at least wanted—in order to pair the landscape of 1761 with the one that was supposed to be there, at least from the perspective of the documents and memories carried with the commissioner and his entourage during their ten-day circumambulation of properties in August and September of 1761. The textual description of what they saw and the accompanying texts and images that substantiated property rights in this landscape offer a glimpse of the creative construction of landscape through the intersection of physical, cognitive, and paper archives. Material landscapes served as an indispensable legal archive of rights and privileges and as a cultural archive of ethnicity, religion, and, more

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

167

generally, social memory. Cognitive, textual, and graphic interpretations imbued the material landscape with meaning. These three “landscapes” (the material, conceptual, and paper) continually interacted with each other.3 These three disparate archives shared, moreover, the threat of abrupt loss and transformation, whether by sudden collapse of human populations (pertinent to the loss of New World social memory), by flood, fire, or insect infestations (most pertinent to paper archives), or by cataclysms, earthquakes, accelerated soil movements, or sudden (dis)appearance of biological communities (processes that affect, mostly, the environment). This chapter traces the consequences of sudden environmental change on social memory, specifically on remembrance—that is, (re)constituting the past for present purposes, an act replete with both individual and social significance. Discordant and fraudulent claims by witnesses, along with revelations in the landscape that seemed unfathomable to commissioner don Núñez de Villavicencio, complicated his task and produced a thick corpus of texts and images: more than a thousand folios of documentation, along with three fascinating images—oblique landscape perspective paintings—that are called mapas in the documentation. A fourth map—with profile perspective, some semblance of scale, repeated cartographic conventions, and sketched with pen—more closely resembles a modern map. One cluster of papers in this series—associated with three oblique-view paintings—is particularly interesting because they were identified as recent (eighteenth-century) forgeries seeking to pass as sixteenthcentury originals. As attempts to pass as historical truth, they tell us much about how past and present landscapes were envisioned. All images and associated text will be examined below. While the circumambulation is but a historical blip in the early modern world, it sheds light on two processes that I believe reverberate in the wider historiography. First, the circumambulation shows that environment was a dynamic factor in social and cultural history. Climate-induced environmental change in colonial Mexico troubled remembrance. It buried, extracted, swept away, or simply reconstituted a landscape populated by culturally, economically, and politically meaningful landmarks that were cornerstones—sometimes quite literally—of not only landed properties but local ethnic identities.4 Such abrupt memory loss was compounded by what Daniel Pauly calls the “shifting baseline syndrome.”5 Humans tend to reset the clock for environmental change at the beginning of their lives, argues Pauly, making it difficult to observe change across generations. Compounding forgetfulness was the perishability, ephemerality,

168

|

Chapter 5

and deliberate erasure of materiality in preindustrial organic society. Residential structures composed of adobe bricks, thatched roofs, living fences, and other organic materials quickly washed away or collapsed into mounds that grew over in grass and bushes, soon indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. Stone and metal building supplies were rare and tended to be repurposed when no longer of use in the original structure. Rubble and ruins were powerful agents of memory, which, because of their power to rekindle a pre-colonial past infused with idolatry, were systematically and deliberately razed by colonial officials. Most importantly, resettlement of the indigenous population in the late sixteenth century (reducción, or congregación in the parlance of the time) was intended to initiate a clear break with the past. In a fascinating and insightful account of the methods and cultural consequences of this process in sixteenthcentury Bolivia, anthropologist Thomas Abercrombie calls the reducciones of the 1570s and after “places of amnesia,” an intentional product of Viceroy Toledo’s insidious plan to extirpate idolatry and social memory. As Abercrombie argues, Toledo recognized that what had to be forgotten could not “be easily described in words, precisely because so much was implicit, habitual, even preconceptual. It could not be explained; it had to be lived.” In the tabula rasa of the new settlements, colonial conceptualization of history, place, and identity had a better chance of succeeding.6 Textual and graphic representations of landscape were instrumental in Spanish legal practices and were accorded the highest status among the diverse types of evidence. Yet such paper landscapes of the colonial era were constituted by chains of landmarks. As Nicholas Howe notes about England, “without a system of abstract demarcation, such as the grid of longitude and latitude, places cannot be mapped with an absolute location but exist instead in a contiguous and sequential relation to each other.”7 The paper landscape, despite its elevated status in the courts, relied on practices of visual identification, such as circumambulations, to locate and identify landmarks and, ultimately, to make words and images material. The quasi-permanent legal archive, then, was insubstantial in and of itself. Its legal force rested on on-the-ground testimony, highly interpretative acts nested in failing memory, personal motive, and historical contingency. On August 21, 1761, the Friday before the circumambulation, the commissioner warned the owners of the neighboring properties that “if some of the lands covered by the inspection were currently usurped by neighboring property owners, then [the commissioner would] clear these lands immediately of those

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

169

who are found to have transgressed.”8 This threat of economic loss spurred neighbors to defend their lands. For personal and political reasons, the stakes were high. Understanding the primacy of such an archive in the eyes of the hegemonic Spanish legal apparatus, witnesses seized on the opportunity provided by abrupt change to realign the paper landscape with the new cognitive reality of the material and sociopolitical world. The strategies employed by witnesses reveal a broad attempt to use the circumambulation as a means to (re)write the “Conquest” landscape: a hybrid landscape that was the foundation of both legal and cultural mestizaje, which, as the commissioner came to realize, could only be found in fraudulent documents, misplaced landmarks, and devious sites of pagan worship. Such interactions of landscape and memory in the wake of Little Ice Age–induced ecological disaster, as we will see below, reveal how severe climate anomalies begat more than disaster; they produced energized and socially constructive attempts to rewrite the past for the purposes of the present. As witnesses demonstrated through testimony and the submission of documents, we will see that the transformed landscapes were not “places of amnesia,” but sites of hyperactive remembrance.

A Local Maelstrom The Holy Office had chosen a celebrated officer for the acta indagación, or investigatory process. As a young man, Villavicencio was corregidor of Mexico City at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a member of the Mexico City elite, attained the position of chaplain in 1734, and rose through both the judicial and ecclesiastic ranks.9 He obtained the titles of licenciado (university graduate) and abogado (attorney) and functioned within both the Real Audiencia (Royal Court) and the Real Fisco del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de la Nueva España (Royal Treasury of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of New Spain) before finally attaining the title of doctor in 1755. Five years before his death in 1772, he wrote a text of usury and agrarian credit, no doubt a product of such circumambulations. Otherwise, however, there was little to be gained from spending ten days on horseback traversing the rural countryside. The country was very dry in 1761, so severe that livestock died of an unnamed sickness related to failing pastures and dried-up watering holes. After a very dry spring and early summer, torrential rainfall arrived later in the summer, with flash floods recorded in Mexico City, Tlaxcala City, and other regional centers.10

170

|

Chapter 5

Perhaps the real reason that the esteemed doctor had been asked to carry out this judicial inquiry was that he was set on putting an end to unfinished business. Once before, in 1753, Commissioner Villavicencio had walked the eastern perimeter of these estates along the Zahuapan River to settle a dispute between don Francisco Nieto de Almizón, owner of the Rancho la Concepción, and don Luis Athanacio Gil, the new owner of the Río de las Vacas estate.11 The commissioner had found that the Zahuapan River, which divided one property from the other, shifted laterally and played havoc with property rights and, by extension, with timely repayment of the Holy Office’s loan. The problem of an inconstant environment continued until 1761, both in that specific location and, as he was soon to learn, mostly everywhere else along the property perimeter. The commissioner was determined to resolve a dispute that had lingered for more than fifty years. The inspection of 1761, as ordered by the doctor´s superiors, was to be carried out in the “fullest possible manner.”12 Indeed, the case left few stones unturned. The inspection crew frequently retraced its steps in order to gather more field notes and set this information against what was in the land titles they carried with them. In many instances, the crew would reassemble at the same location on a number of consecutive days so as to give the commissioner the opportunity to ask new questions or so that new witnesses could be brought to answer old ones. He paid close attention to anomalies in the soil and vegetation, recognized faint traces in the landscape that might identify historic roads and canals, and even asked members of the entourage to pull out their knives and scrape away soil to expose embedded landmarks. His notary (Antonio Dávalos) recorded testimony about the etymology of Nahuatl toponyms that the commissioner had requested from the indigenous members of the entourage. At one point, he went so far as to stop a muleteer who happened to be passing by in order to gather information about the historic road network in the region. In retrospect, the commissioner’s 1753 investigation seemed straightforward compared to his current task and, moreover, far more satisfactory to everyone, himself included. Soon enough, he realized that he had landed himself in a local maelstrom that would complicate and stymie his efforts and, ultimately, lead to his voluntary withdrawal from the proceedings purportedly for “medical reasons.”13 The factors that thwarted his investigation had little, if anything, to do with open local resistance to the commissioner or the Holy Office that he represented, at least not initially. When the owner of the Hacienda de Cuamancingo, don Alejandro Muñoz de Cote, defaulted on the loan to the Church, he

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

171

initiated a process that no one wanted, especially not neighboring property owners, who had clearly transgressed the limits of their rights as set out in the archival record. Indeed, the paper landscape was, at best, a poor approximation of the actual uses of the land, concealing a flexible system of property relations that, while far from perfect, facilitated living with uncertainties about where boundary lines were located according to the law. It concealed, moreover, historically contingent understandings of land use that permitted habitual borderline transgressions. Local landscapes defied state logic of ownership; titles and rights of owners overlapped one another and often did not coincide well with the reality on the ground. Arrangements between neighbors might have an unwritten, historical dimension that took into account familial and labor relationships, past and present, that could not be represented easily by text; nor would neighbors wish to formalize (and make permanent) such arrangements. In his examination of similar surveys and inspections in nineteenth-century Mexico, Raymond Craib found that the simplified legal landscape could not be reproduced on the ground. As he argues, “in trying to simplify and codify a landscape of overlapping jurisdictions and use rights, of ambiguous borders and shifting place-names, state officials had to reconcile a profusion of contradictory and competing claims with the few remnants of documents available in municipal archives.”14 None of the local parties ensnared within the commissioner’s delineatory agenda wished on themselves the arrival of such Mexico City officials, that is, unless desperation or an assurance of victory motivated one or another party to initiate litigation. This was most certainly true of the owners of the two estates at the center of this dispute: don Alejandro Muñoz de Cote, owner of the Cuamancingo estate, and don Luis Athanacio Gil, owner of the Río de las Vacas estate. Despite their complaints about neighbors usurping land, making the repayment of the Church’s loan difficult, engaging neighbors in decade-long litigation was clearly plan B. First, the two men tried to wrench concessions and clemency from the Holy Office, both arguing that the loan should be inapplicable to his estate because repayment had ceased long before the purchase of the estate in 1753. Moreover, the Holy Office was reminded that the mortgaged property had originally included two estates (Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas). Now, reduced to one entity, the operations were less fiscally sound.15 The Holy Office rejected these arguments, demanded either payment or the forfeiting of the estate, and then eagerly backed don Alejandro’s wish for a full inspection of the boundaries. This action sparked a full-out mobilization

172

|

Chapter 5

of lawyers, notaries, interpreters, archival clerks, and anyone else who could buttress the argument of one or another side in the dispute. While their neighbors were assembling hundreds of pages of documentation, the owners of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates had no documentation other than the 1698 Oropeza possession. Their estate records had been lost, burned, along with most other documents, by arsonists during riots in Tlaxcala City in 1692, at the end of anomalously cold weather (frost and snowfall), flooding, and an epidemic that brought about famine and a general crisis. Ironically, the late seventeenth-century climate extreme destroyed both paper and material landscape archives. While the specter of litigation was on the horizon, and with no documents in hand, it seems that Gil and Muñoz de Cote must have publicized their despair, asking for knowledge of any documentation pertaining to their estates. In May or early June 1761, they were notified by Juan Palafox Rivera, an indigenous official from the nearby town of Apizaco, that some of their documents had been located by Juan Uriarte, another Apizaco native, who had actually stolen the papers from the trunk of Manuela Santos, an india cacique (indigenous noblewoman) from the town of Huamantla. The two estate owners quickly organized a trip to acquire the papers. Sixteen pesos bought them ten pages of text in an obscure and deliberately opaque Nahuatl. Eight other pages were in Spanish. The pages are blackened, seemingly deliberately. Three images (called mapas) are included and, like some of the text, purport to be from the 1530s and 1540s, a remarkably early era for colonial land documentation. Convinced of their authenticity, on June 17, 1761, the estate owners brought the text and images to Tlaxcala City, the seat of the gobernador and council members of the Cabildo.16 Clearly, they trusted the professionalism of the indigenous government and sought to take advantage of the Cabildo’s staff of scribes and interpreters to copy and translate the documents. On August 25, 1761, the day before the circumambulation, the Cabildo notified the commissioner that Juan Palafox Rivera was in the provincial jail for the distribution of fraudulent papers. In total, the Santos trunk had yielded at least twelve sets of papers sold to ten different Tlaxcalan indigenous communities, along with those sold to Gil and Muñoz, for over two hundred pesos. Despite the charges, Palafox would admit only that the documents of two towns were forgeries. Both Manuela Santos and Juan Uriarte were dead and could not be questioned. Given the orthography, paper, content, and unusual genre of the documents, it is quite certain that the papers of Gill and Muñoz were

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

173

fraudulent, meaning that they were not created at the time or by the people that the purveyors of the documents had claimed. The idea of fraudulence, however, has many ambiguities. Were the documents reproductions of some original or of a later colonial reproduction? If so, this would explain the deliberate acts to make them look more antiquated than they were. Were the documents liberal interpretations of the past based on local memory and document review? This would have made them an attempt to recreate the documents of the estates that were deliberately incinerated by the rebels. As we will see below, the information in these “forged” documents speaks to a way of conceiving history and landscape—although in 1761 rather than 1533—that would be foolish to discard as historically inaccurate. Apart from these documents, the commissioner was soon inundated with documents from the Cabildo; from the towns of San Lucas Tecopilco, San Simeon Xipetzinco, San Juan Atlancatepec, and San Martín Xaltocan; and from the owners of large estates named Santiago Buenavista Tepalcatlalpan, Zacatepec, Zavala, and San Andrés Buenavista. To take just one of these examples, the Tepalcatlalpan estate was, at best, a minor player in the affair, bordering the Cuamancingo estate (and the town of Xipetzinco) at just one small corner where a large tree had once stood. To buttress their case, the owners submitted, at first, 450 folios of documentation, then later two additional books of papers.17 When the commissioner and Dávalos retired each afternoon to the Cuamancingo estate, their dinner and rest must have been cut short by the need to review documents. When they arrived in the field in the morning, they were well prepared with highlighted passages from these many tomes. This was a complex patchwork of properties with a far messier reality on the ground. The case revealed an intricate web of conflict, primarily between the two estates in question (Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas) and every neighboring property owner. Such was the case of don Joseph González de Silva, owner of the San Andrés Buenavista estate, who opposed the commissioner’s ruling and sued for damages from 1763 to 1765. Conflict also erupted, however, between the neighboring properties, who seized on the opportunity to even the score of previous disputes. Certain problems that had been present for years but not worthy of mention were now considered egregious transgressions of the law. For instance, the Cabildo revealed in 1761 that don Alejandro Muñoz de Cote, owner of the Cuamancingo estate, had usurped and farmed land for a period of seven years.18 The Cabildo crafted for the commissioner a harshly worded denunciation of the owner of the Cuamancingo estate:

174

|

Chapter 5

Learning of this [investigation], this Very Noble City applauds these proceedings, so just and with such a decorated judge like Your Honor, which promise

the end of damages occasioned by don Alejandro Muñoz de Cote, owner of

the Cuamancingo estate. Having benefited [illegally] from the lands of the Cañada [Amalinalco] that he took over maliciously— which are the property

of this city— he has devised pretexts and plans to lead us all treacherously into reckless litigation so that, perhaps, by mounting expenses and personal losses

of our chief attorney [procurador mayor], those in Mexico City would eventually withdraw their assistance from [our attorney] and to be expected . . . abandon the case and leave [don Alejandro] to carry out his aims.19

The Cabildo’s text implies that the purported abuses had reached unprecedented levels before the commissioner and had persisted for much time. Yet no trace exists in local or national archives that the Cabildo had litigated or pressed viceregal authorities to correct the alleged infringements. In the Cabildo’s pursuit of rights to its Ejido grazing lands (since 1699) and compensation for damages to the Ejidos committed by a transient herder from northern Mexico, not once in this litigation did it mention conflict with owners of either the Cuamancingo or Río de las Vacas estates.20 Clearly, once the lawyers were out, the Cabildo had to work by the letter of the law, announcing a “long-standing” dispute that had troubled no one until just days before. In this first of three examples of the strategies and devices used to harness memory and documents to realign the paper and biophysical environments, I show that the literal foundation of memory and identity had shifted. Yet the townsfolk, government officials, and estate owners sought nervously to contain the fallout and search out the past in the contemporary landscape. To make sense of environmental change, the players employed a variety of creative strategies, which I classify into three broad categories: reattribution of toponyms in the material landscape, hybridization of landscape, and disclosure of a hidden conceptual landscape. Let us begin with the first of these: reattribution.

Reattribution To the west of the Cuamancingo estate lay the Ejidos de Amalinalco of the indigenous Cabildo, an expansive pasture land whose eastern boundary was a broad valley, between the Centzoncuauhtipan Hill to the east and the Techalote-

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

175

pec Hill to the west, that the Cabildo sometimes called the Cañada de Amalinalco. In the early colonial era a twisting marshland existed in the valley, and the Cabildo tried several times to farm it before deciding to reserve its dense grasslands for sheep and cattle grazing. Technically, laguna de amalinalco means “lake of place of twisted water,” a toponym that is an awkward hybrid of two Spanish words (laguna de, meaning “lake of ”) and one Nahuatl word (amalinalco, “place of twisted water”). The Cabildo was correct to associate this land with a place called Amalinalco. The area had been called Amalinalco in 1547, and in 1553 had been labeled Chicuemalinalco (Place of Eight Twists).21 In late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century documentation, some variations of these words appear: Amalinalpan (Place on the Twisted Water) and Los Llanos de Amalinalpan (The Flats of Place on Twisted Water).22 In 1749, someone in the Cabildo’s pay noted that it had once been called Chiyauhmalinalco (Place of the Twisted Marsh), hypothesizing (correctly) that this name derived from “the turns that the water used to make in those parts.”23 It is quite evident that Amalinalco once referred to a long, sinuous, wetland environment. The Cabildo’s archival records would not let Amalinalco, the toponym and place, be lost. It needed to be located, or reattributed, in the landscape of 1761. The Oropeza title stated clearly that the western boundary of the Cuamancingo estate (i.e., where the Cañada de Amalinalco should be) was a drainage ditch that connected a lake in the northwestern corner of the property and another somewhere to the southwest of the estate. The objective of the commissioner was to follow this drainage ditch to the south until it met up with the Xalatlauhco Ravine, a reach of approximately one league. At the height of the rainy season in September 1761, the commissioner and the representatives from the various properties that neighbored the Cuamancingo estate found no sign of the meandering marshland, but only a dry ditch, clearly trenched by human and animal labor in the 1690s and first decade of the eighteenth century, precisely at the time of the greatest multidecadal drought since at least 1450 CE. The entourage paused at the intersection of the ditch and the Xalatlauhco Ravine, which descended from the Centzoncuauhtipan Hill, which lay to the east of the legendary Valley of Amalinalco (i.e., the ditch). As discussed in the previous chapter, they encountered here high sand levees that clearly had formed in recent decades, descending from the flanks of the Centzoncuauhtipan Hill, entrained by extremely powerful runoff events. The sand ridges impeded flow in the valley, which now lay barren except for a small patch of grass upstream of the sandy wasteland. The sand impressed and confused the

176

|

Chapter 5

members of the entourage. The Oropeza title did not mention this most outstanding geomorphological feature, even if the Nahuatl name for the ravine (Xalatlauhco) denoted the natural presence of sand on the hill. At some point in the last sixty years, unprecedented fluvial storm events had displaced the sand and remade the valley below. Once the entourage had ascended the hill by way of the ravine, they found the source of the sand deposits in the valley. The flanks and plateau land were badly eroded and deforested, while the remnants of failed metepantli dotted the landscape.24 They then descended the Xalatlauhco Ravine to arrive back in the vast sandy wasteland cut by a dried-out ditch and a single ribbon of grass. There, in this desolate location, the governor of the Cabildo launched a protest, claiming this land to be the “immemorial” property of the Cabildo. The governor laid claim to the land from the northwestern pond to the ribbon of grass in the south, erroneously identifying Amalinalco as the northwestern pond. Amalinalco had never been a circular and relatively deep body of water. Its association with the 1761 body was impossible, at least based on previous documents that the Cabildo itself possessed. Given what we know about Amalinalco, it is most likely that the ditch was Amalinalco, or at least it had been carved from the sediments that filled the valley. The Cabildo’s assignment (or reassignment) of the pond with Amalinalco thus gave new life to the “sinuous wetland,” at least in name, in location (roughly), and on paper by preserving a harmony between its documents and the landscape. The search for Amalinalco involved the Cabildo, Alejandro Muñoz de Cote, owner of the Cuamancingo estate located to the east of the disputed land, and don Joseph Gonzalez de Silva, owner of the Buenavista estate to the north. The owner of the Cuamancingo estate voluntarily offered to concede this point to the Cabildo. On the one hand, the land in question was not large and the sand deposits made it almost worthless for any agricultural purposes. Muñoz thus gave up very little. Indeed, by conceding this point to the Cabildo, the Cabildo’s property lines would all be pushed northward into the domain of the Buenavista estate, a move that counteracted the strategy of don Joseph who—as revealed on the first day of the circumambulation, August 26—had sought to draw the southern perimeter of his estate farther to the south. Now, seven days later, on Wednesday, September 2, Alejandro was pushing back. Muñoz’s strategy was to use the Cabildo to help his cause. Don Joseph had been battling the Cabildo of Tlaxcala in a protracted war of words and pesos in which he launched deeply insulting accusations against the province and

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

177

sought to shrink the latter’s powers and finances. In 1757, don Joseph had been appointed diputado (deputy) by the increasingly activist and reformist Bourbon Crown. The task of the diputado, in this case, was to oversee the accounts of the Cabildo and to carry out an assessment of titles for rights to land and water, a task that netted more than six thousand pesos that was mostly returned to the viceregal government in Mexico City. Don Joseph had begun, by 1761, to meddle in the affairs of the city. As described in the previous chapter, a catastrophic flood regime had developed in the wake of the 1690s that was directly connected to upstream erosion. The Cabildo had hatched elaborate plans to combat these increasingly destructive floods that ruined urban architecture and infrastructure, while don Joseph, on the other hand, had advocated a do-nothing strategy. According to the Cabildo, “he does not want Tlaxcala [i.e., the indigenous political administration] to exist.”25 Thus, reattributing Amalinalco to the north would activate the Cabildo as a force in Muñoz’s favor.

Embodying Landscape In a recent monograph, geographer Joy Parr builds on historian Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “embodied history” to conceptualize the ways in which historical actors make sense of a rapidly changing environment and, conversely, how the habits of the mind/body and different social technologies filter what one perceives in the environment.26 Among these three objects—the habits of mind/body (or, the “enduring reservoirs of past practice which actively influence subsequent responses”), technology, and environment—Parr argues for the presence of a “tuned reciprocity” that results in “specific modes of bodily attention and perception.”27 Her study and the Bourdieusian approach in general seek to understand how the material world structures behavior and knowledge via sensory mechanisms that provide information and shape human experience. Parr’s approach looks beyond the dominant linguistic paradigm, which tends to focus first and foremost on the limits of expression and, by extension, of knowing. This approach to the human experience and perception of environment makes sense because it rests on historically contingent factors and moves scholarly discussion away from an interpretation of the discursive strategies that shape thinking and writing about environment and from the predecessor of discourse analysis: the study of the innate physiological structuring of perception of the extra-somatic world. For example, the rise of print culture made

178

|

Chapter 5

Europeans “less practiced listeners.” Alternatively, in a fascinating example from post-WWII Canada, Parr shows that the damming of a river whose shores had been inhabited for more than a century produced unspoken damages: Changes in the moving water were bodily assaults to residents who had learned to reckon direction, duration, distance, and depth by embodying the seasonal

movements of the lakes. Commodified water [the dam holds back water used

downstream for power generation], which moved in time with market demand, was too unpredictable to embody, too quixotic to depend upon as a reference point for the orientation of self in place.28

While Parr’s examples do not bear directly on Tlaxcalan history, the approach certainly does, helping to open a window into the strident cognitive dissonance between the commissioner—an educated, scientific man from the city—and the locals with whom he interacted and sought to learn from (and then judge). Indeed, it was the commissioner who could not imagine the rapid erosion of this environment over his lifetime. The merged materiality of the Old and New Worlds and the demographic collapse of the New World occurred suddenly enough to constitute an unparalleled phenomenological catastrophe. Furthermore, the environmental transformation of this region of Tlaxcala from the mid-seventeenth century until 1761 represents yet another crisis of an “embodied lostscape,” to use Parr’s words.29 In the following section I continue to look at how persons in colonial Tlaxcala made sense of environmental change. Foundational narratives about past places and the place of ethnic and familial lineages within those places shaped the way that colonial observers saw, interpreted, and recorded local landmarks and landscapes. In one of the more revealing moments of this ten-day tour, Villavicencio and his entourage traveled along the gently sloping terrain of the northern boundary of the estates. There, Villavicencio followed the faint ruts of the Old Royal Cart Road—which had once served to transport precious cargo to and from Mexico City, the port city of Veracruz, and then to Spain—until he reached a deep, impassable gully. According to the documents available to him, especially the all-important 1698 Oropeza title that described the land for which the loan was issued, the gully was not supposed to exist. No maps or textual descriptions indicated its presence in the late seventeenth-century landscape. More puzzling, however, was how such an important commercial artery—in operation in 1698 and after—could have been routed through such inhospitable land. The Holy

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

179

Office clearly had outstanding notarial resources at its disposal, as the notary left a thorough account of the conversation that transpired: At this point, the commissioner asked which was the crag [mentioned in the

Oropeza text], and the witnesses answered that it was there, in his own shadow and that its current condition as seen today, denuded and cracked open in many places, possibly occurred as a result of the earthquakes. And he asked as well

which were the hill and the creek that they had read about, and they responded

that the hill was the same that was just spoken of and the creek was that which he was currently looking at. And the commissioner said that by the road that he

followed here, northward along the Camino Real de Carros, along which don

Bartolomé de Escobeda guided and pointed out things [to the commissioner], he tried to cross the ravine [barranca] that had just been read about, and reflecting more on how the carts [carros] could pass through there, being so deep [the

ravine], the aforementioned Escobedo said [in response to the commissioner] that because those were sloping lands [tierras colgadas], the runoff [avenidas] deepens the land and with time barrancas are formed [se hacen barrancas], and

that when the carts used to cross there was not that ravine. And from there

they went guiding to where, nearby at the edge of a barley field, they took what appeared to be vestiges of an old road, and the witnesses went along pointing out traces of tracks as though the ruts of cart wheels.30

Villavicencio was an outsider to the area and clearly could not comprehend the catastrophic nature of the landscape, or at least as attested to by witnesses such as Escobedo and others. Escobedo used a delimited nominal object (tierras colgadas) and reflexive verb choices (se hace barrancas) to suggest that abrupt erosion of such magnitude in these types of lands was perfectly normal. Another witness, a farmworker named Miguel de Villapando, also naturalized the erosion with reflexive verb choices and matter-of-fact language, but then suggested, ominously, that in those times there was not that ravine, which formed [se hizo] after the great sickness of the year of ninety six [1696] . . . that before this barranca was formed [se hiciera], there was in that place a little water spring that perhaps with its

water and the downpours [aguaceros] and torrents the soil was swept away and deepened [se fue robando la tierra y profundando] until leaving it in the state that it is today.31

180

|

Chapter 5

The commissioner maintained, or tried to maintain, his scientific stance. For this purpose, he carried with him a magnetic compass. At the beginning of the ocular inspection his notary recorded the commissioner’s accurate use of the tool: “He took the bearing with the compass toward the hillock of Xipetzinco and keeping it to the east of the said headwaters with a slight declension to the south.”32 As a sensory technology, the compass revolutionized the visualization of space and instantly set the commissioner apart from locals. The compass was the first step toward plotting objects accurately into a geometrically constituted cartographic grid. He is the first person whom I have found to carry this tool in a colonial inspection, although judging by the rapid ascent of geometric cartography during the eighteenth century, he was not alone. Mapping practices at the time of his report used scale, longitude, and latitude and often tried to represent local vegetation with some accuracy. Indeed, others had been tracking across Tlaxcala in the decades before don Nuño Núñez arrived at the Cuamancingo estate. Three maps from the Tlaxco region—just north of the commissioner’s inspection region—from 1741, 1742, and 1743 show the contemporary use of these scientific technologies of representation and, most certainly, of sense (i.e., the compass).33 Thus, the use of the compass marked him as conversant with these new cartographic traditions sweeping across Mexico. The local perspective, on the other hand, is portrayed by a map presented to the Real Audiencia on February 14, 1765, by don Joseph González de Silva, owner of the San Andrés Buenavista estate (figure 21). Don Joseph’s map was produced a few years after the circumambulation in response to the commissioner’s findings in the delineatory proceedings. The central region of the map has four sections of text, each derived from the commissioner’s text and each delineating a disputed area of land between the two parallel roads that run fully across the length of the map. The roads structure the entire composition and were evidently drawn before anything else. For don Joseph, the matter rested on the identification of roads and, by extension, rates of landscape transformation. The boundary between the Cuamancingo and Buenavista estates had been, according to documentation, the Camino Real de Carros, or the Royal Cart Road, one of the most important roadways in the colony, linking Mexico City (as well as silver mines such as Pachuca, not far from these proceedings) to the port of Veracruz, and then to Spain. Because of its low gradients (as compared to shorter but steeper routes), the road was used mainly to haul goods (i.e., silver and mining equipment) out of the colony and heavy ballast like wine from Veracruz into the highlands. On day one of the circumambulation, don Joseph

F I G U R E 2 1 Don Joseph González de Silva’s map, 1765. Two images are shown: don

Joseph González de Silva’s map (left) and a schematic of this map (right). Drawn with black ink on four sheets of paper. The entire map measures 43 × 104 cm. Black lines represent rivers and lakes, and gray lines represent roads. The “^” character represents topographic features. 1. Atlancatepec, 2. Tezoyotepec, 3. Tliliuhquitepec, 4. Cerro de Cuaxapo, 5. Zoltepec, 6. Tlalayotepec, 7. Mazatepec, 8. Techalotepec, 9. Zacatepec (aka El Escarpín), 10. La Peña, and 11. Los Cuecillos. Roman numerals correspond to the various place of human habitation: I. Pueblo de Atlancatepec, II. Hacienda de Buenavista, III. Hacienda de Zoltepec, IV. Pueblo de Apan, V. Pueblo de Calpulalpan, VI. Ejidos de Tlaxcala, VII. Hacienda de Techalotepec, VIII. (again) Ejidos de Tlaxcala, IX. Pueblo de Hueyotlipan, X.  Hacienda de Cuamancingo, XI.  Hacienda del Rio de las Vacas, XII. Pueblo de Apizaco, XIII. Barrio de Tlalmimilolpan. (AGN Mapoteca #1418, AGN Tierras, Litigation for land.)

182

|

Chapter 5

had made the argument that the road known, in 1761, as the camino real was, in fact, the camino nuevo, the new road. The camino antiguo, the old road, lay much farther south, as much as one mile. The basis of his argument was that the old road had been nearly completely lost to erosion. The commissioner was so perplexed by this that he spent three days circumambulating the area, with don Joseph and his mayordomo going along “pointing out to the commissioner some faint tracks and ruts in the manner of an old road that had been traveled on, and at one point specifically they got down to show a sign of something like a road that they said to be the base of the camino real that the carts, themselves, had cut into by the weight and frequency of the traffic.”34 According to this line of argumentation, the old road had passed just to the north of the Cuecillos, a site of ceremonial pyramids constructed in the era of the great classical city of Teotihuacán (ca. AD 100–650). The Cuecillos lay about seventy-five kilometers away from the great city of Teotihuacán, which was one of the largest urban complexes in the pre-Hispanic New World— indeed, in the entire world at the time. More than a thousand years later, the commissioner—a cultured man of the Spanish elite, working for the Holy Office of the Inquisition—was curious about the Cuecillos, perhaps thinking about its idolatrous past and its cultural and religious significance, in 1761, to those who lived there. More overtly, he commented on the quality of the ancient road in that area, no doubt comparing it to the woeful state of the colonial road that was causing him so much trouble, and which opened opportunities for astute litigants such as the Cabildo and don Joseph. As wrangling ensued over “old” and “new” roads, or even if there were such possibilities, he could not come to terms with the speed of landscape change. That barrancas could form in decades, that roads could be washed away in years, that all vestiges of a world that had existed sixty-four years prior could be eliminated from his sights, were too much for the commissioner to accept. When the Holy Office made its determination on the case the following year, it sided, not surprisingly, with don Athanacio Gil of the Cuamancingo estate, thereby preserving, or enlarging, its economic basis. Don Joseph’s argument was denied, and the property line was pushed back to the north. The decision enraged don Joseph and prompted him to use his considerable wealth and power to launch a long, costly, and successful campaign from 1763 to 1770 in the civil courts (audiencia real). One interesting outcome of don Joseph’s civil litigation was the production and inclusion in the litigation of his own map and conceptualization of the terrain, a cartographic impression that highlighted (and annotated) the new and old road network (figure 21).

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

183

Although don Joseph might have commissioned the map from a close associate, his wording in the associated text strongly suggests that he drew it himself. The scale is variable, stretching and contracting depending on the density of the space represented. The map has roughly three different scales: the central zone depicted with the largest scale, a second ring that uses a scale equivalent to roughly 80 percent of that used in the central area, and the third zone (the corners) that shows distant communities and uses a scale of about 20 percent of the central zone (see figure 22). The cartographer wrote the appropriate cardinal directions at each end of the map and, judging by the orientation of the vast

FIGURE 22 Scale and cardinal directions of don Joseph’s map. The four cardinal directions surrounding the map are those given on the map itself. The map’s scale varies considerably, but is most consistent in the region closest to the Zahuapan River where distances between known landscape features are consistently accurate within 10 percent. The areas marked “80 percent” have much more variation of scale, but mostly fall within one-fifth of the central scale. The “20 percent” zones represent the distant towns of Apan, Calpulalpan, and Apizaco and appear on the map, presumably, to show the end points of roads mentioned in the commissioner’s report, thereby helping to locate the map within the regional context. (Adapted from AGN Mapoteca #1418.)

184

|

Chapter 5

majority of text, intended readers to lay down the map with south at the top. With this orientation, don Joseph’s estate is situated at the bottom (i.e., north) center, giving the illusion that the rest of the map is a panoramic view from the point of view of his estate. This also helps to explain a forty-five-degree distortion in the placement of the cardinal directions; the map requires a fortyfive-degree clockwise rotation. Don Joseph’s map left ample room for the addition of textual elements that relate to the debates about the location of landscape features significant to the circumambulation and the associated legal documents. Only topology— the contiguity of features—is accurate. Scale and direction are inconsistent. The cartographic decision to relegate the map’s spatial aspects and to privilege the textual and topological was in line with his primary goal: to convincingly ascribe historical landmarks to features in the observed landscape. To this effect, the bulk of the map consists of text. The central areas of the map (shown in the diagrammatic version) are completely filled with text, much of which is taken almost verbatim from the testimony. The map focuses mostly on the road networks and hydrology and represents them quite accurately (excepting the forty-five-degree rotation needed to correct the orientation). These were key landmarks in Villavicencio’s report that delimited don Joseph’s estate. Certain other key elements in the determination of don Joseph’s estate appear on the map even though they had long since disappeared, such as an inn (“Venta de Atlangatepeque”), a fluvial channel (“Rio de Atlangatepeque”), a road (“Camino Viejo”), and a bridge (“Puente de Atlangatepeque”). “Natural” features of the landscape such as vegetation or topography do not appear unless they are designated landmarks mentioned in the report. Furthermore, the map paid close attention to Tlaxcala’s religious architecture and hierarchy. Churches appear in all towns, but not in the barrio of Tlalmilolpan where there was none. Some churches have additional naves, while that of Apizaco is drawn with arched construction that closely represents the building. Hills and towns take on a glyphic, even logographic form on the map, especially the town of Atlancatepec, which is the only town accompanied by a hill and the only settlement to have the word “hill” (-tepe(tl)-) incorporated in its name. Again, this is not an attempt to represent topography, but rather to exhibit the landmarks most critical to don Joseph’s local worldview, not to mention his economic solvency. Thus, don Joseph drew the world he knew intimately: a landscape that opened from the front door of his four-hundred-year-old estate onto plains, grasslands,

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

185

and cultivated fields that he experienced as a constant movement of seasons, streams, animals, vegetation, neighbors, and so forth. The land from this angle is both intimately known and yet highly symbolic. Intimate in terms of knowing where things are and how they look. Accuracy decreased with distance. Dominating his map are historical landmarks, some of which had long disappeared from the landscape. This was a highly personalized historic landscape, embedded with memories and symbolized by landmarks, that mixed matters of identity, wealth, and patrimony within the confines of geography and history. It has been noted above that such confluences of people, land, and history appear frequently within the primordial titles genre and, it could be added, in other indigenous genres, such as sixteenth-century maps, genealogies, and painted manuscripts.35 Yet this chapter also suggests that such notions are well documented and demonstrated by the lives and views of non-indigenous persons too. Living locally, without access to historical or spatial abstractions, tends to produce such a view. To use Parr’s terminology, locals had embodied these landscapes. As an outsider, an itinerant officer of the Holy Office, and as a man of the times who metered both time and space, the commissioner exposed the subjectivity and narration within the local landscape.

Hybridization The falsified documents purchased by Alejandro Muñoz de Cote and Athanacio Gil provide another voice to understand how the landscapes of both the sixteenth century and of 1761 were reenvisioned in 1761. The documents represent an anonymous, less politicized voice, what we might see as the social memory of landscape. Muñoz de Cote and Gil did not draw up the documents, nor does it seem that either played a role in the conceptualization of them. If they had, why would they have offered the Cabildo an opportunity, months before the circumambulation, to vet the documents and maps? The forged documents present a hybrid view of landscape, mixing past and present with indigenous and Spanish. Figures 23, 24, and 25 are the three images submitted to the commissioner for the purposes of the delineatory investigation. Whoever created these images and texts knew the landscape and critical landmarks well. How would these forgers have known to highlight Amalinalco, the Cuecillos, el Escarpín, and so on—all critical landmarks? Another image focuses on the puente de Atlangatepeque, a bridge that the commissioner was

FI GURE 2 3 Don Diego Najara y Becerra near Tecopilco and Xipetzinco. The mapa credits authorship to don Diego de Najara y Becerra. Accompanying documentation asserts they date from 1533. Color on four sheets of common paper, 60 × 85 cm. Note: An error on the online server for the AGN resulted in only about two-thirds of the image reproduced online. So I offer here a mixed image of the high- and low-resolution versions. Original in color. AGN Mapoteca, #889.

Diego de Najara y Becerra. Accompanying documentation asserts they date from 1533. Original in color on four sheets of common paper, 62 × 87 cm. AGN Mapoteca, #890.

FI GURE 2 4 Peacemaking at Cuamancingo with Malintzin, Cortés, and local noblemen. The mapa credits authorship to don

FIGURE 25 Cortés and Malintzin await peacemaking near Texopan and Zacatelco. Accompanying documentation dates the painting to 1533. Original in color on four sheets of common paper, 61 × 85 cm. AGN Mapoteca, #1417.

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

189

keen to locate because it would demonstrate the location of the “old road.” While it is true that some landmarks such as the contadero and the nopalillo are not mentioned in the 1761 circumambulation, most are. Take, for instance, the identification and location of “Amalinalco” in one of the forged maps. The falsified papers of the Cuamancingo estate make frequent mention of Amalinalco in the text and depict it clearly in one of the “maps” (see the center-left of figure 23). The accompanying text describes Amalinalco as “a lake” situated west of a field of prickly pear cacti (el nopalillo), and as connected to a drainage ditch that flowed westward. Here, we see a convergence of the way that the forgeries describe the hydrological feature and the Cabildo’s own description of it as recorded in on-site testimony during the circumambulations. Even though the Cabildo denounced the papers and, as one of the administrative bodies with legal power in the province, had held those responsible in jail, it might have been influenced by the content of the falsified documents. After all, the council had more than two months with the papers before the circumambulation. Just as the Cabildo had done, the falsified documents reattributed Amalinalco with the drainage pond to the north. Similarly, toponyms were altered to better fit the current material reality of the landscape, a Nahuatl tradition of naming conventions that was carried into Spanish by the forged papers.36 Hilltop towns were renamed to better fit the contemporary landscape. Take the examples of the towns of San Simeón Xipetzinco and San Francisco Zacatelco (another name for the Río de las Vacas estate). The toponyms had made reference to a “smooth, skinlike” texture (xipetzinco) and a “place of gathered grass” (zacatelco). In the forged papers, Xipetzinco was called Tepetlatitlan (“a place near the hardpan”), while Zacatelco was remembered as Tepetlaticpac (“at the top of the hardpan”).37 The emphasis on tepetlatl (hardpan) highlighted the ecological degradation that had occurred on these hills. Chronology, too, was systematically modified in the documents. The falsified documents referred to historical figures from the sixteenth and seventeenth century in ways that seem to mix fact and fiction. Real people from the seventeenth century suddenly appear as actors of the sixteenth. The forged titles do not account for the evolution of the estates’ properties over time. From 1601 until 1670, the various owners of the two estates continued to add to the land base of these properties, yet the 1761 documents show this to be a fait accompli by 1542.38 Ironically, this chronological disorder is what makes the documents so relevant to the current study of memory and landscape. While the sequential

190

|

Chapter 5

evolution of the historical property boundaries may be of interest today, chronology mattered little to the makers of forged documents.39 This is not to say that history did not matter. The documents fixate on historical details, although not in a manner accepted by today’s academic or even popular standards. Remembrance of the foundational moments of the estates mattered most to the authors, not their sequential ordering in an abstract timeline. Estate owners cared little about when they or their predecessors purchased the various parcels belonging to their estates, only that they held their legitimate titles and that the Spanish Crown had approved the terms of acquisition. Nicholas Howe, a historian of Anglo-Saxon England, shows that inscribing history within landscape is an ancient practice that turns upside down common notions of history and geography. In Howe’s examination of Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he argues: Geography serves as the anchoring principle of history when conventions of chronology have not yet been fixed, when it is easier to define one’s subject as

concerned with what happened there in a given place rather than with what happened when in a given time. . . . Geography was a way of shaping the history of [Bede’s] narrative.40

The forged titles of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates manifest this same principle. Moreover, as documents created by indigenous persons in the 1760s, it is not surprising that the titles presented to the commissioner seem to mimic a genre of indigenous corporate land titles that historians have come to view as primordial titles, or títulos primordiales. Early sixteenth-century land surveys done by Spaniards provided the títulos with their original content, but as Lockhart has argued, the títulos seem to be an “independent redaction” or even “parallel record” of those first surveys. Over time, the titles became infused or overlaid with information contained in subsequent surveys conducted long after the Conquest. There is little concern for precise record keeping of dates or boundaries. The titles also contain an air of orality in that town officials read versions of them at public gatherings. As Lockhart notes, “the style is declamatory, the tone that of advice by elders to present and future generations.”41 One of the basic attributes of the títulos is their liberal conceptualization of time and the spatial configuration of that unique historical vision within the parameters of a circumambulation of the boundaries of the altepetl. Robert Haskett reveals an interesting interplay between history and landscape, arguing that the

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

191

landscape becomes an ordering mechanism for memories about politics and citizenship. As he puts it: History in the primordial titles is episodic and disordered. It is caught in the

folds of the landscape, recalled when the description of properties pauses for a

moment at a particular landmark. . . . One might picture a procession of town

officers, nobles, and citizens pacing off the boundaries under the hot semitropical sun of Morelos, halting at a cross, the mouth of a cave, or a particular

tree while one of them reads from a title or recites from memory a historical anecdote associated with the place. The meaning of the incident, rather than its

particular temporal confines, is what is important. Space, not time, determines its arrangement on the living canvas of the past.42

Of course, the owners of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates were not indigenous, and it might seem inappropriate to apply the interpretive framework and nomenclature of the títulos primordiales to their titles. Such apprehensions overlook the social and cultural (not to mention racial) mixing that occurred. Racial categories and difference in colonial Tlaxcala remained fixed within the legal and political sphere, but within the day to day and the spheres of economy, culture, and even religion, racial boundaries were quite fluid.43 Remember that the two owners of the estates, don Alejandro and don Luis, had purchased the documents from Juan Palafox Rivera (who had functioned as an officer of land transactions and titles—ministro de vara—in the nearby town of Apizaco). The bundle of documents they purchased contained not only papers relevant to their estate but also others relevant to surrounding indigenous communities. In one case, don Luis had encountered a title relating to the nearby town of Santa Bárbara Acuicuitzcatepec and promptly made the twelve- to fifteen-kilometer journey to hand deliver the paper he presumed would be of great interest to Acuicuitzcatepec town officials. As mentioned earlier, they then brought the documents to the Cabildo’s translators to study and transcribe, again showing a trust in the professionalism of the indigenous government and involvement in the wider community. Beyond the context of producing, procuring, and translating the documents, the content of the estates’ títulos primordiales suggests that conceptions of identity and historical interactions between indio and español had blurred and sometimes fused into a single Tlaxcalan narrative. One might even see evidence of an emerging post-colonial discourse in mid-eighteenth-century Tlaxcala.

192

|

Chapter 5

The present and future of the two estates were deeply entwined in the indigenous past of the place. Take the name of the estate, San Bartolomé Cuamancingo. In the 1556 Tlaxcalteca census, written entirely in Nahuatl with alphabetic script, it is clear that the estate took its name from the central town of “sanc bartholome oztoticpac”44 (Saint Bartholomew at the place above the Cave), while its Nahuatl name was taken from one of Oztoticpac’s subordinate wards, either cuamantlac or cuamantlan,45 both of which have the meaning of “Place of (the) Standing Tree Trunk(s).”46 The forged documents revive this origin: the namesake tree is represented on all three of the forged mapas but especially (top-center) on figure 23. The circumambulation revived the idea of the palo huérfano, or “orphaned stick,” thus carrying on in eighteenth-century Spanish legal code the historic name shown in the Nahuatl documents. In the commissioner’s report, nearly two hundred years after the founding of the estate, the location of the cave and tree trunk still mattered because the logic of the names was evidence of an estate’s boundaries. Thus, at the top of Centzoncuauhtipan Hill, a witness for the Cuamancingo estate, a sixty-five-yearold man of Spanish lineage and long-time resident of Tlaxcala, don Antonio Hernández de Lara, rekindled memories of the “palo huérfano,” which had for fifty years been nothing but a slight hollow in the ground where the tree once stood. The notary paraphrased: the boundary goes up to the headwaters with another barranca47 named San Bartolomé where there was [in the past] the “large tree” that the questionnaire mentions, but which the witness was only able to see the trunk [of ] as a young

man about eighteen to twenty years old, and today not even that exists at pres-

ent but only a trace of the hole from which they pulled it out, which he saw just eight days ago.48

Even though the indigenous tradition never intended these to be permanent “names,” the indelible archival record of Spanish legal practices posed an obstacle to ephemeral naming practices in Nahua culture.49 Legal documentation over two centuries old often contained unsettling reminders of toponyms that were no longer in use, that nobody could remember using, and whose meanings no longer had resonance in the contemporary landscape. Yet the scripts of landscape could not be entirely rewritten. Surely there must have been other methods of remembering which ravine was the barranca de San Bartolomé other than by the palo huérfano that had been missing for fifty years. Even

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

193

the name of the ravine was taken from a town that had disappeared 150 years before 1761. These names, however, were inscribed in founding narratives and then written down centuries after the Conquest. The importance of the palo huérfano was not that it was seen as a biological spectacle in the countryside. (One account simply called it “a big oak tree,” hardly significant for the central Mexican highlands.) The palo huérfano was remembered by don Antonio Hernández because it was part of a larger narrative, a story about the founding of the Cuamancingo estate. One of the astonishing aspects of the forged documents is just how accurate they can be at times. This fact is outlined in tables 4 and 5. The forged documents focus on the founding of the estates in the early sixteenth century and highlight the central role played by don Diego Najara y Becerra and his brother don Luis in making peace and converting to Christianity. European town architecture, the Atlancatepec bridge built after the Conquest, and key landmarks from the 1698 document contextualize the arrival of Spanish political and religious authority. Figure 23 shows a full-body painting of don Diego in the center. All three paintings suggest the process of Christian conversion, but do so only at the margins of the images. TABLE 4 Founders of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates. Actual names

Remembered names

doña Petronilla Najara Becerra doña Petronilla Soria Becerra doña Ana Nava Ana Tabares Pedro Tabares el maese de campo Luis García Najara Luis García Najara don Diego Romano Altamirano

Petronilla Najara Becerra doña Ana Tabales Ana Tabales Crus Masata doña Ana Tabales Mazata don Luis Najara Becerra don Diego Najara Becerra don Diego Mazata

Note: I have standardized spelling and simplified names by removing “y” and “de,” which were used inconsistently in the texts. Most of the names in the forgeries actually belonged to previous owners of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates. In fact, not only were versions of their names remembered, but memory was kept of these important people having founded pueblos, which was true, and that their properties derived directly from Indian nobility, which was also true. Of course, the names of people had become mixed with others, and the people involved and the stories told are from the mid-seventeenth century, not the mid-sixteenth century.

TABLE 5 Comparing versions of the origins of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates.

Remembered story

Actual story

Three indigenous Nahuatl-speaking siblings founded the estates and gained privileges of land and nobility as reward for their participation in the conquest of Mexico. The siblings were don Diego Najara Becerra, don Luis Najara Becerra, and doña Petronila Najara Becerra.a

In the mid-seventeenth century, a maese de campo (high-ranking military officer) brought the two estates together for the first time.b He and his brother were Spaniards named el maese de campo don Luis García de Najara and don Luis García de Becerra. The former’s wife was doña Petronilla de Soria. A woman by the same name, grand-daughter, married don Diego Romano Altamirano and further enlarged the two estates.c

Within these lands, don Diego founded various indigenous towns (pueblos). He graciously donated land to the Cabildo and other indigenous noblemen from the area to settle and plant maguey.

The two brothers also founded the nearby town of Apizaco (for both Spaniards and indios) in 1631 by royal consent.d The Cabildo had rented land to the two estates.e

In 1551, one of the brothers purchased rights to the land and labor of a parcel of land that bordered the northeastern corner from an indigenous noblewoman named doña Ana de Tabales. (“Tabales” would be the Nahuatl rendition of “Tabares.” In Nahuatl speech and text, there is no sound similar to the Spanish r; it was thus pronounced and written as l.f )

In the 1590s, Ana de Tabares sold land in the northeastern corner of what became the Río de las Vacas estate to Antonio Jorge.g Ana was not of nobility, although she married a wealthy Spaniard. Her Nahuatl-speaking mother, Agustina Xilotl, had three children with a Spaniard named Pedro de Tabares. Agustina had been married to another unnamed man when she bore the children. All of this land was, indeed, derived from indigenous nobility.h

AGN Tierras, Documents of the Cuamancingo, mainly fols. 11r– 59v. AGN Tierras, Investigation into missed payments (1663), vol. 3306, fols. 28– 31. c AGN Tierras, Investigation into missed payments (1663), vol. 3306, fol. 12r. d AGN General de Parte, Verification of Apizaco. e AGN Tierras, Litigation for land, fol. 63r. f Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written, chap. 17. g AGN Tierras, Litigation for pesos, fol. 16r. h AGT Fondo Histórico, Testament of Pedro de Tabares, fols. 17– 18, 28r.

a

b

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

195

In figure 24, the image of Saint Bartholomew is likely a toponymic glyph in that it is situated on the upper horizon of the image, beside a tree of the same size (with the shape of an oak—that is, the palo huérfano, the namesake of the Cuamancingo estate), which is itself beside a third similarly sized object, a hillock, probably the sacred Otonteotl hill. Thus, in classic indigenous logography, the upper plain of the image suggests a reading of “This is San Bartolomé Cuamancingo, a sacred place.” The lower half of the figure seems to be a continuation of the picture above; that is, it fits to the right of the upper plain. The shading and slope of the hill shown top and bottom suggest this interpretation. In any case, the lower half focuses almost exclusively on the politicization of the landscape. In the background of the lower plain, Spanish soldiers march from the left to the center of the image, while indigenous soldiers approach from the right. In the foreground and in the center of the image, the hands of the indigenous translator and diplomat La Malintzin (aka La Malinche, or doña Marina) and Hernán Cortés reach out to each other. At the same time, Malintzin’s left hand extends back to grasp that of one of the four indigenous noblemen, probably don Diego Najara y Becerra, suggested by the map’s inscription: “Map of don Diego Najara y Becerra of the town of San Bartolomé Cuamancingo.” With his left hand, don Diego waves the other three noblemen forward and thereby shows his leadership role in this act of alliance and peacemaking. The arrangement of the two scenes vertically and not horizontally as a panorama allowed the painters to highlight the triangular relationship between religion (e.g., the sacred tree), the indigenous mother (Malintzin), and the Spanish father (Cortés) and thus to express an underlying point of the forged papers: the boundaries of español and indio had blurred. In one story from the forged documents of 1761, it is told that on November 6, 1542, don Diego Najara y Becerra and his brother don Luis Najara y Becerra met (purportedly) with the gobernador of the Cabildo and members from the communities of Tecopilco, Xipetzinco, Cuamancingo, Texopan, Zacatelco, and Tlayecac in order to confirm the ownership of a huge tract of land that would later become the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estates. The brothers “lent a piece of the land [to the townsfolk of Tecopilco] so that they [the commoners] could build houses and plant maguey.” The purported legal document made it clear to the leaders (caciques) of Tecopilco that this was borrowed land and that the subordinates should “not interfere with the lords [señores] Najaras Becerras because they could sell or lend away their lands as they wished.”50 Men from all of the communities then assembled and walked the boundaries of

196

|

Chapter 5

this parcel of land. This not only confirmed that all members of the assembled group accepted this arrangement, but it placed don Diego and don Luis within this community and, in fact, as leaders of it. The text stresses the existence of maguey plantations, which shows a continuity in landscape between the Conquest era and the period when this story was actually told, the mid-eighteenth century. (By 1761, maguey planted in the Texopan parcel had emerged as a major source of conflict between villagers and the Cuamancingo estate.) A series of three images, or maps, memorialized this ceremonial transaction in full detail, showing critical elements of the region’s hydrology, vegetation, topography, and settlement geography, as well as the full social and ethnic panorama of elite, commoner, Spanish, indigenous, and religious sectors of society. La Malintzin, the archetypal mother of the colony, fused this social contract with her metaphorical and physical powers by using her own hands to link the hands of Hernán Cortés and don Diego Najara y Becerra. Of course, all of this was a “forgery,” a word whose double meaning is appropriate to this situation. It was something crafted or fabricated (in the neutral sense): an invention, an act of creativity. So, too, it was a fraudulent, spurious production. Some aspects of this transaction might have occurred in the sixteenth century, but most of the places, people, and acts represented are anachronisms. An interesting aspect of the presentation, then, is that it attempts to “naturalize” don Diego and don Luis (two seventeenth-century Spaniards), as well as the maguey plantations (again, a seventeenth-century invention). Moreover, don Diego and don Luis are depicted as indigenous noblemen. The harmonious meeting between them and Hernán Cortés—facilitated by La Malintzin— highlights the merging of these two cultures and thus tries to convey the idea that the current owners of the Cuamancingo estate, although legally Spanish (españoles), belonged in Tlaxcala. They had a right to be there and to control native land. Finally, all three paintings bring together the past and present in a single space. It is the narrative of the Conquest that matters in these images. Cultural and racial miscegenation are themes that resound in the images and texts of the forged documents. Because they are forgeries, it would be easy to reject them as products of a conniving mind. Yet the mestizo mind of the authors and painters of these materials shows indigenous influences, and many of the stories are so close to fact that they exhibit a sincere attempt to represent the past in a manner congruent with their creators’ understanding of history. The geography of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas estate enshrined those events, gave

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

197

place to them and embodied them. As a result, the 1761 forgeries speak volumes about the common tendency in Tlaxcala (and probably across central Mexico) to emphasize present landmarks in the past and the necessity of keeping alive the toponymy of a bygone era by assigning it to present landmarks even as the landscape changed.

Disclosure We have seen how the case of Amalinalco showed how the paper landscape of words and toponyms was actively reattributed to new physical landmarks. Next, the case of the forged documents revealed how social memory in central Tlaxcala actively blended past and present, Spanish and indigenous, and even used the modern landscape to reform toponymy. Both broad strategies—of reattribution and hybridization—were highly successful in the wake of climateinduced environmental change. So, too, environmental instability opened the door to rediscovery, or less innocently, disclosure: deliberate attempts to discredit foes by way of remembrance of things forgotten. This is true of the relationship between the Cabildo and the town of Tecopilco, which was certainly strained by the circumambulation. The Cabildo was the only indigenous polity in New Spain to have its own immense indigenous territory. This power was achieved shortly after the Spanish conquest, as reward for Tlaxcala’s alliance with Hernán Cortés during the conquest of Tenochtitlan. The Tlaxcalteca played an instrumental role in the Conquest and went on to conquer areas to the north and south of their homeland. This overarching power led to considerable distrust and outright hostility between it and small-scale towns. In the region of the circumambulation, the towns of Tecopilco, Xaltocan, Acuicuitzatepec, Tlatlauhquitepec, Huitzcolotepec, Hueyotlipan, and Xipetzinco had formed a constellation of strong economic and ethnic power. All had roots in a cultural and linguistic group known by the dominant Nahua as Otomí. In some ways, these relatively central towns were the gateway to the predominantly Otomí north of Tlaxcala. Before the Spanish conquest, these fierce fighters had allied with the Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalteca. After the Conquest, their power was reduced relative to the dominant Nahuatl speakers and, over the generations, acculturated into Nahua society. Evidently, this constellation of Otomí polities had not conceded fully to the central power of the Cabildo. Indeed, a title from 1714 shows that Tecopilco and

198

|

Chapter 5

Acuicuitzcatepec formally composed a single polity (altepetl).51 These Otomí towns had been fighting the Cabildo through litigation, with often humiliating results for the latter, a fact seen in the previous chapter. For the Cabildo, the circumambulation served as a good opportunity to disgrace their adversaries in the village of San Lucas Tecopilco by revealing, first, landmarks that tied the village to past idolatrous practices, and second, the inconvenient fact that the same village had been an enemy of Hernando Cortés and, by extension, of the Spanish state. After the Conquest, the Nahua succeeded in disseminating histories that eliminated evidence of their resistance to Cortés. Resistance, the Tlaxcalan Nahua alleged, had been the work of the Otomí living in Tlaxcalan territory. Indeed, the Ejidos, as property of the Nahuatl-speaking ruling elite from Tlaxcala City, about thirty kilometers to the south, was one of the spoils of Conquest, a sign of the Otomí’s full subjugation. The Cabildo was eager to reveal to the commissioner the Otomí past of the town of Tecopilco (as well as its neighboring village of Xipetzinco). Toponyms suggesting ritual use of caves had already been mentioned in the previous day’s circumambulations, but fortunately for those of Tecopilco, the entrance to the cave site could no longer be found; witnesses reported it had collapsed during a major earthquake in decades prior. Near the lost cave was the Cuecillos, which suggested a thousand-year history of idolatry. The commissioner was already sensitive, then, to the landscape’s idolatrous past.52 Unfortunately for Tecopilco, a crucial landmark in their own titles was the hillock known as Otonteotl. The commissioner asked for a translation of the toponym into Spanish. Town officials from Tecopilco were first to respond, hoping to limit the damage. They said it meant “a divine thing, or of the gods.” The Cabildo intervened, correcting the translation, saying “the rigorous meaning was idol of the Otomis.” Making matters worse, documents carried with the commissioner noted that the Otonteotl hill was supposed to have a cross mounted at its top, but the cross had gone missing, leaving the Christianization of the hill and of the town in doubt. The depiction presented by the forged documents was much more conciliatory, emphasizing this to be a sacred landscape, but a Christian one. This same hillock that is home to Otonteotl in the Cabildo’s version is painted and written about in the forged documents as a land repopulated with Christian beliefs. The text argues that the San Simeon church was built on land donated by the indigenous founder of San Bartolomé Cuamancingo, don Diego de Najara y Becerra. Now, in 1761, there remained just three stones with the words Jesus, Mary, and

Memories of a Devious Landscape

|

199

Joseph. Indeed, Christianity was fully written into the foundational history of the town of San Bartolomé Cuamancingo. In two images, churches are mixed with European-style town architecture. In the other, Saint Bartholomew (portrayed with bushy beard, Bible in his left hand, and a raised knife in the right to symbolize his flaying) stares out from his hilltop mount, which is likely Otonteotl, given that both the hill and the saint reflected the act of flaying. The hillock, often called the Cerrito de Xipetzinco, thus highlights the presence of the flayed god, Xipe. Similarly, Saint Bartholomew’s hagiography says that he was flayed alive. Borejsza notes that residents of Tecopilco recount a story of “a ‘bewitched’ San Bartolo on the hill,” a legend that carries forward the Otonteotl’s spiritual powers and hazards.53 Social memory as presented in the image also suggests the harmonious relationship between the indigenous of the town of San Bartolomé Cuamancingo and Hernán Cortés, projecting an image of mestizaje: the impending embrace of not only Malinche and Hernán Cortés, but with don Diego Najara y Becerra, the purported founder of the town and creator of the map. By adding the third member to this alliance between Spaniard and Indian, the image suggests that not only were locals complicit in this union, but that they played an essential role in protecting it.

Conclusion Environmental change was clearly a fact of life in the early modern era constituted by organic, ephemeral societies: a material existence that was essentially biodegradable and recyclable. This made change a routine experience, rarely committed to memory. In a time of severe climate anomalies combined with rapid cultural change and demographic collapse, change became abrupt and catastrophic. Clearly, environmental transformations impacted what could or could not be harvested or extracted from land and water. A lesser known but equally important aspect of abrupt environmental change, I have tried to argue here, is its contribution to memory loss. It erased, moved, buried, and morphed landmarks that were crucial to both property rights and cultural identities. For the historian, this amnesia becomes apparent in offhand remarks in colonial archival documentation of, for instance, whole towns having been moved or lost. In the 1761 circumambulation, a road, a bridge, and an inn used from the midsixteenth century until 1698 (for about 150 years) had been largely forgotten. In one outstanding case, few could remember where the “old royal road” had

200

|

Chapter 5

been, or worse, if it had existed at all. Readers of these societies and environments must be aware of the false sense of environmental stasis produced by the endemic social amnesia of past societies. Just as importantly, however, the mirage of stasis is reproduced by a hyperactive memory. While such acts of remembrance, forgetting, imagination, and disclosure form a rich cultural tapestry, they also systematically diminish our ability, as historians, to observe change. As the material landscape disappeared or was reshaped, it was quickly populated by memories. By searching out and by claiming that they had found in the landscape what was no longer there, the voices in archives made the real world invisible to us. The circumambulation of 1761, like others before and after, both in and outside of Mexico, was a moment to extend and rethink memory, to highlight what mattered and to forget what no longer seemed relevant. It brought witnesses with competing interests—from a diversity of indigenous and Spanish backgrounds—to observe and often explain away (minimize) the damage. Attempts to rationalize and repopulate—to reembody the landscape with meaning—are not necessarily fraudulent acts, but a means to domesticate a rapidly changing world. Toponyms became mobile, taking new forms as they did; landmarks of idolatry and disloyalty were brought back to the surface to delegitimize adversaries. Landscape was reimagined as inherently mestizo, more congruent with current realities. These realignments show a dynamic, adaptive, and still contested relationship between memory and landscape. Freed of inconvenient textual reminders of forgotten landmarks from bygone eras, the forgers of the Cuamancingo and Río de las Vacas papers had a unique opportunity to write the history of the estates from their own perspectives. That is, they had a chance to put down on paper the kinds of historical moments that really counted, in their minds. What mattered to the forgers was not the tedious and quite meaningless sequencing of time, but the enshrining in landscape of the foundational moments of the Conquest. Witnesses to the circumambulation consistently made landscape a canvas for history.

Conclusion

T

he key to this story about colonial cataclysms, climate change, and agrarian adaptation is, I believe, the tracking of the formation of water and the accumulations of silt, clay, and sand in valleys, floodplains, and colluvial and alluvial toeslopes (i.e., the lower portions of hillsides). Whereas it is hard to detect erosional landforms (which is to track the absence of something—no easy feat), water-saturated environments and deep deposits of sediment always seemed to attract attention. It is thus significant, I argue, that documents relating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mention water but not sedimentation, while the sedimentation suddenly appears as a subject of much concern in the eighteenth century, especially by midcentury when deposits had reached two or more meters deep. Chasing water and dirt, as I call it in the introduction, can be a productive and empirically sound method. It is worth pausing for a moment to contemplate and imagine what this transformation looked like. Archaeological reports in Teotihuacán mention between two and four meters of silt, depending on where one is in the village’s old wetland. The present patios of the Acolman convent sit 2.4 meters below the surrounding area, but the original patios were likely another sixty centimeters lower, bringing the total to three meters. These numbers, gathered on site in 2012, are nearly identical to the 2.5 meters mentioned by Manuel Gamio in the 1920s.1 Already in 1740, surveys of the silt in the cultivated areas in the valley (i.e., those areas least affected by silt) described the accumulation of about one to

202

|

Conclusion

two meters in ten years.2 In Tlaxcala, there are reports of entire bridges buried in sand, probably indicating three to four meters of sediment, apparently deposited between 1740 and 1780. These quantities are astounding. Imagine yourself sitting in a standard room with eight-foot ceilings. Look up and visualize dirt filling the room not only to the top of the ceiling, but part of the next floor as well, reaching somewhere between the knees and the head of a person standing there. Such sedimentation was deposited in less than one hundred years. Of course, much sediment never reached the valley, or did so years afterward, having been caught in the upper valleys, riverine environments, or along colluvial footslopes. Yet more of the sediment was washed right through, passing by the valleys and downstream to either the Tetzcoco Lake or to the Atoyac and Balsas Rivers. The rates of accumulation were alarming in valleys, reaching about ten to fifteen centimeters (four to six inches) per year at their peak (ca. 1730–50), although deposition rates were probably episodic, with accumulations of a foot or more in flood years. These were cataclysmic times for which I have sought causes, which, in turn, led me to the definitive role of interactions between land use and climate extremes. I posit two disparate periods: one an extended Little Ice Age crisis until 1630 in which there is virtually no geomorphic change, and another with an acute climate crisis followed by unthinkable degradation and aggradation. I have tried to explain this. I have also tried to explain what this meant to colonial societies who lived through these climate-induced crises and who, in the eighteenth century, had to cope with this profound redistribution of dirt.

Water in the Archive It will be helpful to highlight the methodological underpinnings of what has been done. Claiming to know something about the environmental undercurrents of colonial society raises questions about the reliability of the results of this study. It might be remembered from the previous chapter that during the commissioner’s 1761 circumambulation of the Cuamancingo estate, he encountered outright deception, falsified documents, an ephemeral landscape, changing toponyms, and a general failure to remember what the past landscape looked like, all of which made his task difficult and largely impossible to complete. One wonders if the vision of the past improves with the passing of two and a half centuries, or if the insurmountable problems encountered by the commissioner in his circumambulation of 1761 have lessened or disappeared. In short, can a

Conclusion

|

203

history of colonial central Mexico present a reliable picture and explanation of the pace and extent of environmental change? Water acts as one of the epistemological lifelines of this book. It was visible and omnipresent to residents of colonial central Mexico and, because of this, is visible to us today in the hydrographic archive. It offers a means to gauge (in the aggregate and in the particular) the extent and timing of degradation in the countryside and so helps to narrow the discussion of probable causes in site-specific or event-specific examples. Whereas most historical studies use multiple individual examples to infer by induction, the river reverses the flow of logic by delineating the temporal (and to a lesser degree, spatial) contours of degradation, which then guide subsequent research into the causative factors. Thus, site-specific evidence of degradation takes on greater meaning when assessed by the light of the river’s panoramic projection. Moreover, if sufficient examples can be compiled, the two images of change (i.e., the aggregate and the composite) help to corroborate each other and thereby make the study’s results more reliable. This methodology has greatly strengthened the conclusions of this book. In fact, without the river’s delineation of the temporal contours of degradation, I would have struggled, and likely failed, to sense the environmental repercussions of agroecological change in colonial Mexico. While this study shows the importance and potential of colonial sources to reconstruct (and correlate) indigenous agricultural systems, demographic change, and climatic fluctuations, these historical processes say very little about the general ecological conditions. No sequential data series other than that of rivers can so tie together the spatially and temporally disjointed indications of the ecological consequences of the interaction between land use, climate, demography, and socioeconomic change. The river—or more precisely, the hydrological system— acts as a proxy of ecological conditions in the entire basin and, by a tracing of its evolution, presents a picture of the type and timing of environmental change. The river and its basin tell a convincing story of environmental change. The rapid onset of a much-increased likelihood of flooding and the disappearance of wetlands throughout the basins examined indicate a profound and simultaneous transformation of hydrological systems across central Mexico. When stormwater cut a new fluvial channel through the Atlancatepec Marsh and joined previously separated river segments, or the Río de San Juan formed raised channels and deposited four meters of silt in the lower basin, new rivers were born. I must admit that identifying what happened where and when was a daunting task, often with many errors that needed to be corrected as research accumulated—a process aided by the application of GIS methods. Yet little if

204

|

Conclusion

any of this hydrological transformation remains uncertain in my mind. Colonial observers recognized the changing behavior of rivers and the reorganization of the channel network. They described it relentlessly by way of maps and texts, often in engineering reports, but also in small-scale litigation. Only the timing is at all debatable, although I believe I give enough consideration to time lags of sediment transport to prove a post–Late Maunder Minimum phenomenon. Timing matters to this story. Knowing when the transformation occurred enables some confidence about the causes of this large-scale environmental phenomenon. What is crystal clear is that the Colonial Mexican Pluvial influenced central Mexico’s hydrology in profound and unilateral ways. Indeed, not only did it directly and single-handedly initiate flooding across the region, it is also very likely that its dramatic and deleterious social effects—of excess water—inclined humans to make ill-advised interventions in how water flowed, thereby preparing the basins for the increasing likelihood of inundation in future decades. I am thinking, here, about the well-documented and muchstudied case of the wetlands of the Valley of Mexico. In response to the flood of 1629, dam and reservoir infrastructure was built to hold back water during peak humidity in the lower reaches of many rivers, a process that initiated siltation, stream avulsion, and flooding above the dam. When siltation reached its maximum depth allowed by the dam, regions downstream of dams actually suffered more frequent flooding than prior to the construction of the dams because the natural wetlands that were eliminated by the new infrastructure no longer cushioned runoff. Perhaps it is time to reverse the causation in this case, to admit that wetness drove human action that drove further wetness. This accounting of natural agency is a small piece of the puzzle, but one that redefines the desagüe as a desperate act of folly rather than a mad predilection toward dryness. The hydrographic archive is univocal about the soggy conditions of the pluvial. When friar Andrés de San Miguel wrote about the humidity of his era, he did so accurately but also with an ascetic modesty befitting his station. Rivers were swollen. Marshes were full. New springs burst forth. Old ones increased their flow. In the great endorheic basins of the Neovolcanic Axis, the water often had nowhere to go. It collected in depressions and floodplains. Seasonal wetlands encroached on towns. San Miguel and like-minded astrologers and cosmographers struggled to make sense of the pluvial, but they did not despair, except perhaps Enrico Martínez, who hatched a very ill-advised plan that has been effectively described by Vera Candiani. The generally well-tempered and oft-favorable view of the rising waters left to us by the mapmakers and

Conclusion

|

205

chroniclers of the Relaciones geográficas or by the travels of friars, especially those of Antonio de Ciudad Real, gave us a wonderful collection of water-themed paintings and rich descriptions of pluvial. The spate of maps for these purposes and mainly for litigation is truly impressive and was not repeated again until the mid-eighteenth century, contemporary with the onset of the cataclysmic landscape. So the worlds of central Mexico that we know make manifest the periods of extreme humidity and desiccation, the latter resulting from the dual processes of dehumidification and degradation. There was little incentive to paint and describe non-extreme hydrological conditions. The process of dehumidification is the hardest to track because it involves the slow disappearance of water rather than its materialization or the appearance of sediment. Moreover, the ephemeral nature of wetlands in the highlands, the seasonal rise and fall of water, made it difficult to judge when reports of desiccation represented something more than a withdrawal from the pluvial maximum. There are signs in the wetland of desiccation in the mid-seventeenth century, exactly when a key paleoclimatological proxy (cave minerals) suggests the development of drought conditions. This desiccation occurs nearly parallel with an upsurge of flooding between 1645 and 1653, which strangely matches high PDSI values in the region. Two decades later another upsurge in flooding occurred in the three watersheds. Floods in July (1675) and August (1680) diverged from the pattern of September/October floods that dominated in subsequent decades. This might indicate a watershed less able to handle regular summer weather, or it might indicate a return of cold, wet conditions. After all, early-season floods were also common at the onset of the pluvial in the mid-sixteenth century. PDSI values for 1680 and 1681 are, indeed, very high, but the twelve-year period from 1671 to 1681 is not significantly humid, according to this metric. Perhaps the onset of the Late Maunder Minimum’s well-documented cold was enough to spur flooding at this time. Then again, wetlands do not tell the same picture. In short, hydrological conditions for the period between 1640 and 1690 are very hard to read. In light of the mixed messages of floods and wetlands in this period, I recommend focusing on the clear message of the flood series. They still occurred simultaneously across basins, still in the same old locations (i.e., there was not an expansion of the geography of flooding), and still occurred at similar—if slightly higher—frequencies than the pluvial. The flow from the springs of San Juan Teotihuacán was as abundant at the end of the seventeenth century as it was at the end of the sixteenth. Finally, there is no evidence of extensive slope wash or valley sedimentation at this time.

206

|

Conclusion

The third and final stage erupted quite suddenly in the first decade of the eighteenth century and reached two cataclysmic peaks, once in the 1720s and another in the 1740s when floods occurred on average every five years. From this period onward, central Mexican rivers became impetuous fluvial beasts that moved vast stores of sediment downstream and regularly pushed through and over their embankments, leaving a complex network of new and defunct stream channels that mystified observers and played havoc with property boundaries. The beginning of the eighteenth century produced the most dramatic flooding even though precipitation patterns remained unexceptional. Rather, the PDSI values tell us that the extreme drought from 1696 to 1705—the worst in Mexican history—was followed by a return to normal conditions. The simultaneous transformation of central Mexican basins became visible, abruptly, in every available register: desiccation of wetlands, sedimentation, erosion, exceptionally high flood frequencies, geographic expansion of flood zones, raised barrancas, stream avulsion, and so on. Left to explain were causes and consequences of the new hydrological era.

Colonial Ecology In this book, I have striven to show that nonhuman forces did not unilaterally determine social or even environmental outcomes. Rural sociobiological systems—which I call agroecosystems—possessed characteristics that made them respond to external stimuli in unique ways. Species diversity, energy flows (i.e., energetics), and field management (the arrangement and succession of species, work schedules, fertility maintenance, to mention a few examples) structured the internal dynamics of agroecosystems. Yet the types, timing, and severity of environmental forces varied considerably; systems built to withstand certain forces failed in other times, with unique and perhaps more severe environmental hazards. In many cases, there was no way to predict the proverbial weak link in complex ecological chains. As one agroecosystem took shape in the countryside, those whose aggregate efforts brought it into being could not foresee the potential complications of the system’s susceptibility to climate fluctuations, demographic pressures (both upward and downward), or even economic and political turmoil. Agroecology of early colonization produced little environmental degradation, a fact established in chapter 2 against the prevailing counterarguments.

Conclusion

|

207

Spanish estates, which occupied an enormous quantity of land, acted far less unilaterally and perniciously than is commonly assumed. They generally operated in flat, less-erodible valley land and tended to employ methods appropriate to the ecological context. Mixed agrarian enterprises predominated, and stocking rates were appropriate. Large sheep estancias followed the exposed grasses in seasonally recessed wetlands. Otherwise, shepherding occurred in a mixeduse and small-scale manner. The ecology of empire, I must conclude, was a good match for the abundant grasses and waters of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial. Old World agriculture—led by Old World agriculturalists—was a mostly benign import to the highlands. Even so, Spanish colonialism still mattered to native agroecology, but neither as much nor in the way hitherto modeled. Colonial central Mexican agroecosystems were made possible by Old World biotic and political forces, yet they bore little resemblance to Old World archetypes. Commercial agroecosystems that dominated Tlaxcala in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance, featured native Mexican species (primarily Opuntia spp. and Agave spp.), indigenous farmers, and, generally, the same fields used in pre-Hispanic cultivation. Yet the emergent agroecosystems were not “traditional” pre-Hispanic cultivation systems nor simple subsistence plots without commercial inclination. The scale of cultivation, methods of transport, and marketing of the products made from these species and, more technically, the arrangement and interdependences of species, the management of soil, soil nutrients and water, and the scheduling and sources of work (i.e., energy expenditures) made sense only in the context of Spanish colonialism. These were new and untested agroecosystems. As such, they cannot be understood through the vocabulary of colonialism, which posits an innate conflict or competition between native and foreign biotic elements. Terms such as “traditional” versus “neo-European” agriculture, “alien,” “invasive,” or “native,” or even the lexis of fusion, syncretism, or hybridity (e.g., mestizaje ecológico) serve a limited purpose in this study; if made a central fixture of argumentation, they tend to impede and circumvent the task of revealing the underlying dynamics of novel colonial agroecosystems, or in the case of ecological syncretism, serve mainly to state the obvious and explain nothing.3 Woolen textile and dye (cochineal) production largely dominated the sixteenth-century agroecosystem, while the following period turned toward alcohol production and associated maguey cultivation. Although both agroecosystems focused on native Mexican species that had been common and at

208

|

Conclusion

times important within pre-Conquest agricultural systems, each had drastically different repercussions on soil and water regimes. More to the point, both the degree of resiliency in the first era and the instability/degradation in the second defy the existing historical models of the “clash” of the Old and New Worlds. How did this occur? I have argued that the critical difference between these two agroecosystems—and the underlying determinant of soil stability or instability—was the type and quantity of energy employed, a factor that conditioned the selection, placement, and management of plant and animal species. Somatic energy systems in the early colonial period persisted as depopulation permitted the continuation of traditional soil fertility methods, including fire to release the nutrients stored in regenerated plant material. Fire integrated well into both somatic energetics and the callalli field system that kept fireintolerant plants near the house and used compost and ash from the hearth to fertilize them. After burning, pyrophytes quickly repopulated the fallowed non-callalli parcels. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, socioeconomic, political, climatic, and, importantly, biological conditions had realigned so as to encourage a fundamental reorganization of central Mexico’s agroecology to center on maguey cultivation and, more specifically, pulque production. Regulations against the production, sale, and consumption of pulque became weaker. Indigenous peasants possessed ever more draught animals for the thriving pulque industry as well as for other agrarian pursuits. By the end of the seventeenth century, peasants had matched the average ratio of hectares per draught animal on Spanish estates, an astounding achievement given their meager means and also an unknown fact of colonial Mexican history revealed by my research. So important were draught animals to this agroecosystem—and so radically did they depart from somatic energetics—that it is difficult to overstate their role in transforming the environment. They ploughed fields, trenched metepantli, and carried pulque both to the octlaliloyan (brew house) and market. In short, only Old World draught animals could have carried out the work required for pulque production at the scale achieved in the colonial economy. In essence, the previously untested metepantli system was an ingenious creation composed of New and Old World species and made possible only under a political regime that compromised (however hesitantly) social for fiscal stability. Pulque production achieved economic solvency on both the local and viceregal level, although in retrospect it had deleterious environmental consequences that nobody fully understood at the time. Erosion followed both growth phases and

Conclusion

|

209

episodes of abandonment. Pulque necessitated growing webs of dependency with political, economic, and biological entities far outside the local ecosystem, made possible through a revolutionary transition to extra-somatic energetics.4 It resulted in increased specialization and decreased local biodiversity. Reduced biodiversity and nested spatial ecological systems made local society and ecology less stable. When climatic, demographic, economic, or even political disturbances occurred, either locally or in another of the nested ecosystems, breaches in the local ecological fabric of hillside soils reverberated across the Tlaxcalan landscape.

Repercussions I have sought to show that environmental forces shaped and patterned colonial Mexican society in profound ways. Central Mexico was an essentially agrarian society with minimal transport capacity to redistribute food staples in times of need and with few effective medical strategies to combat disease. This society coped with the most severe climatic shift of the Holocene: the Little Ice Age. The impacts of disease, famine, cold, drought, or even excessively wet weather triggered social and biological responses that transformed colonial society with little regard for class, ethnicity, or subregion. The repercussions of ecological change were wide reaching, generating further responses in agriculture, land tenure, and the balance of relations between social groups (classes, ethnicities, communities, and so forth). In short, the shifting terrain of indigenous agriculture sent shock waves through social, economic, cultural, and political systems. When the ground that fed and clothed society moved, humans had little choice but to respond. Farmers and communities litigated for possession of the lower colluvial slopes and valley lands, essentially following the dirt and recovering assets lost uphill, decades or generations before. For instance, residents of San Lucas Tecopilco fought for the Texopan parcel and Ejidos de Atlancatepec; farmers in Atlihuetzyan and Yauhquemecan litigated for degraded land near the abandoned hillside community of Tochpan and then below in the Ahuehuetitlan parcel located along the Zahuapan River. Residents of San Simeón Xipetzinco went after alluvium that had washed out from the hillside to the bottom of the Xalatlauhco Ravine (Cañada de Tepetate), where cultivation had newly begun in the eighteenth century. In the Teotihuacán Valley, San Juan fought with the Jesuits over declining water supplies, which motivated the townsfolk to make chinampas. In one of the most dramatic cases, Acolman residents rebelled

210

|

Conclusion

against the local priest who sought to move the parish away from recurrent floods. This occurred after thirty years of legal wrangling about the alluvium that predisposed the Acolman convent to floods. Recurrent floods in Tlaxcala City damaged buildings, bridges, and other infrastructure, and swept away houses and caused drownings. The Cabildo blamed Spanish estate owners in the Chiyauhtempan area, who had (purportedly) caused the flooding by opening floodgates on their dams. In hindsight, however, the accusations seem self-serving (if proven correct, the Cabildo would have gained permission to levy taxes against the Spanish residents to dredge and canalize the river immediately upstream of the city) and the result of an inability to account for large-scale transformations of the basin’s soils. Ultimately, all persons agreed that the underlying problem was sedimentation in the floodplain; they only disagreed as to how sedimentation occurred and, by extension, who should pay for repairs. One of the central and yet largely unrecognized repercussions of environmental change was an instability within textual, graphic, and oral depictions of how past places looked. The speed and extent of landscape transformation perplexed human observers. As seemingly permanent fixtures on the landscape appeared, disappeared, and sometimes reappeared, memories of past places seem unreliable and often creative, even though they were crucial to successful litigation, property inspections, or less directly in the construction of ethnic and gender identities. The space of uncertainty that opened as a result of environmental change (among other things) spurred disputes, extended court cases, and kept humans in harm’s way. Adaptive strategies that dampened or eliminated the negative impact of natural disasters or weather events, for instance, relied on remembrance of past experiences. The pervasive memory loss demonstrated by colonial Tlaxcalteca, then, calls into question Tlaxcala’s ability to respond effectively to environmental change. Georgina Endfield calls this “disaster amnesia” in that “the social memory of the event might not be sufficient to translate into a recognized adaptive strategy.”5 Nevertheless, forgotten places and processes created an opportunity to tell stories about land and people that in a more stable environment would have been easy to reject forthrightly. In these narratives, humans used the landscape as more than a backdrop to their stories about the past; the landmarks, boundaries, place-names, and rituals of landscape (usually involving some sort of movement across the landscape) defined the action or actor as having a “place” within the local history; the event or person belonged there and, by extension, still had

Conclusion

|

211

the right to be there at the time the story was told. Colonial cataclysms initiated a fascinating interplay between physical and imagined places, as perceived, envisaged, and made sense of by the various parties who pleaded their positions during the visual inspection of 1761. The forged documents of the Cuamancingo estate—and indeed, the entire court case and inspection carried out by the commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1761—reveal a deep historical irony. Social legitimacy often rested on the contextualization of significant events in carefully defined places, but memory failed the test of time. Remembrance of past places produced forgeries: retrospectives with iconic elements of a perceived past populating an otherwise present-centered place. Undoubtedly, if the current owners of the Cuamancingo estate had painted—graphically or textually—a truer portrait of the past that did not expose their fraudulent methods, they might have gotten away with their ploy. But they, like those around them—and around us today—did not know this past place. Despite having lived out their lives in the same place, they did not remember where the Amalinalco Marsh was, or even if it was a creek or lake. Nor could the Cabildo’s most knowledgeable men find a suitable answer. The basic symbol of the Cuamancingo estate—the Old Oak Tree—had disappeared without any consensus as to when it disappeared or even if it had disappeared at all. Nobody who assembled at the side of the Zahuapan River seemed to have any inkling that a marsh once existed there and debated instead if the river had shifted course and if so where its old channel was. With so much on the line— property, government revenue, historic landmarks, and even ethnic politics—the commissioner was left with many dissenting opinions and little hard evidence by which to judge the case. Whether it was because of the ephemeral nature of landscape, the often-indiscernible rates of geomorphic change, or, most intriguingly, because imaginary past places could better serve the present, memory consistently failed to accurately represent past places. The past was reenvisioned through a careful mixing of what the storyteller believed to be true and what s/he assumed others would find most believable. Often, their present-centeredness says more about the environment in which the storyteller lived than the past landscape s/ he purported to describe, which can be valuable information. Nevertheless, this study has, I hope, shown the importance of forging a new image of landscape that traces the physical and biological world that fed and clothed these storytellers and that underlines the changing rhythms, relationships, and contingencies established between humans, environment, and climate. Historian Serge Gruzinski argues that indigenous elite responded to

212

|

Conclusion

colonization with enormous ingenuity and creativity; the image he provides is not just of cultural resilience, but of essentially constructive innovators of a new world. The elite were not the only innovators, I add. Peasants built new agrarian systems to fit rising and falling waters, new taxes, new markets, new transportation systems, new demographic realities, and even new climates. They succeeded not only ecologically (by creating original and complex agrosystems), but economically too. It is also true, however, that such creativity sometimes produced unexpected and even unwanted results. Who could have foreseen the great chills of the pluvial or the riotous conditions of the Late Maunder Minimum? Failure to recognize the fallibility of indigenous peasant agriculture denies these farmers an active, creative role in forging their own landscape—their own version of rural colonialism—out of the bits and pieces of an agrarian world made far more complex through the meeting of two worlds. This ingenuity did not end with the metepantli system, but continued as the farmers followed their soil to the valleys below. Natives from Xaltocan and allied towns celebrated their acquisition of part of the Cabildo’s Ejidos and relished defeat of Gobernador Pascual Ramírez and his Spanish ally, who ran the city’s meat supply. As the example of the 1818 Teotihuacán chinampa project reveals, the soil was an active agent in local politics, even in the War of Independence, dividing allies ( Jesuits and Teotihuacanos) and hardening antagonisms between those upstream (degrading pulque estates) and those downstream (aggrading chinampa fields). Of course, the little guy did not always win the litigation battles. Acolman’s rebellion succeeded in the short run, but was fruitless when the irreversible, slow-motion tsunami of dirt ultimately proved their spurned priest to be right. And not surprisingly, the phantom lake—Amalinalco—would never be found, not in forged documents, not by open lies, and not by naïve misplacements. Yet, win or lose, the examples we have seen here show that living downstream of the cataclysms was a prolonged struggle with not only dirt and water, but with neighbors too, conflicts that helped prepare the ground for future battles, be they in the lifetime of litigants or in the decades and even centuries afterward as the earth unleashed by earlier agrarian decisions continued to shape the lives of subsequent generations.

Appendix A Reconstructing Colonial Mexico’s Climate

T

he purpose of this appendix is to provide a new assessment of climatic variability during the period from 1500 to 1850 that complements and explains the climate reconstruction described in the introduction. It is time, and perhaps past due, to bring together and interpret with rigor the relevant climate reconstructions for Mexico. I assess a variety of climate sources from paleoclimatology and historical climatology. A critical interpretation of new climatological evidence shows that historians have misrepresented Mexico’s Little Ice Age both in terms of periodization and characterization. The climatic extremes between 1545 and 1705 have been underestimated, while those of the eighteenth century have been exaggerated. Cold and wet conditions often surface as equally important to drought, and in many cases, more so. To understand the influence of climate variability on social and environmental processes during the Spanish colonial era, I have selected sources (i.e., proxies) that have the following three characteristics: (a) a long temporal duration that enables the identification of the frequency and amplitudes of variability; (b) an annual, subannual, or near-annual resolution (i.e., consistently identifiable year-by-year or season-by-season change) that permits the correlation of well-dated historical sources with the proxy; and (c) a statistically proven correlation with a parameter of climate in the study region (e.g., earlyseason or annual precipitation, late-summer or winter temperatures, etc.). The

214

|

Appendix A

imposition of these criteria reduces the number of proxy types to just two: dendrochronology (the study of tree growth visible as tree rings) and speleology (the study of mineral deposits formed by groundwater in caves). Both types of proxy provide information about past precipitation patterns in colonial Mexico. Nevertheless, I have compiled, analyzed, and interpreted historical evidence from Tlaxcala, Teotihuacán, Mexico City, and Cholula in which agroecological stress (food scarcity) is related to meteorological anomalies (drought, excessive rainfall, hail, snowfall, frost, and food shortages). I call this the Agroecological Index. While the signature of the colonial climate remains reliably present in human and natural archives, establishing what each of the historical and paleoclimatological proxies says about climatic conditions is far from straightforward. Each source must be critically analyzed to determine what, precisely, it is measuring (i.e., the particular climate parameter) and if this measure is reliable and consistent through time. Because each proxy reveals a different aspect of the climate system, it is possible and desirable to compare and correlate one with another, not only to validate each other, but just as importantly to compose a layered picture of climate at a particular time and place, considered at different temporal and spatial scales. Analysis, correlation, and comparison of the three sources will set the basis for the interpretation of climate variability in central Mexico from 1500 to 1850, which is offered in the final section of this chapter.

T H E C L I M AT E O F C E N T R A L M E X I C O Mexico is a highly fractured, mountainous land with a large highland central plateau stretching from just north of the Valley of Mexico (often referred to as the Basin of Mexico) into Texas, and lowland regions near coasts, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and throughout the Yucatán Peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean to form the western limit of the Caribbean Sea. The valley lands of the central plateau rise from near sea level in the north to more than twenty-two hundred meters in the Valley of Mexico. Two long chains of mountains (the Sierra Madre Oriental and the Sierra Madre Occidental) snake down either side of the central plateau—rather like a double backbone. The highest mountains are a series of volcanic peaks, known as the Neovolcanic Axis, that rise to more than five thousand meters and cut across the plateau to intersect with both chains. The land drops sharply down to the Caribbean and Pacific coasts from the Valley of Mexico in a series of large steps—the valleys

Appendix A

|

215

of Puebla-Tlaxcala, Cuautla-Matamoros, and Cuernavaca—and culminates in long stretches of steep-sided hills. Mexico’s long landmass falls between the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, putting all regions within four hundred kilometers of the coast, and narrowing to just two hundred kilometers at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Not surprisingly, the seas are a primary driver of Mexican climate, but especially so the Caribbean and Gulf. With the exception of Mexico’s northwestern region, which is strongly influenced by Pacific climate patterns, Mexico’s precipitation comes from the Atlantic, where easterly trade winds transport humid air over the continent. As the humid tropical air cools as it rises over the Sierra Madre Oriental, the air precipitates as rain, or as snow at the highest altitudes. This mechanism deposits the most precipitation on peaks and windward flanks, and creates a rain shadow effect across the central plateau and western cordillera. This rainfall occurs mainly in the Northern Hemisphere during summer months when the trade winds encounter a low-pressure, moisture-laden air mass (known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone—ITCZ) that migrates northward toward the Tropic of Cancer. From November to May, the ITCZ is south of Mexico and the trade winds thus blow dry. Because southern Mexico sees the arrival of the ITCZ earlier than the north, and sees it twice (once during the northern migration and once on the ITCZ’s southerly return), southern Mexico tends to see greater and more reliable rainfall than the north. Even the northern and central parts of the central settlement zone receive less precipitation than in the southern part and are more likely to suffer period drought. Precipitation patterns in Mexico thus follow a generalized double gradation: precipitation amounts decline both from east to west (because of the Sierra Madre Oriental) and from south to north (because of the ITCZ migration).1 Temperature patterns in Mexico follow a simple dynamic: Altitude exerts a strong influence on the climate of any particular region, and folk definitions of the region’s climate were (and are) based on altitude: areas below seven hundred meters are referred to as tierra caliente (hot land), those lying above this but below eighteen hundred meters are called tierra templada (temperate land), and those higher still as tierra fría (cold land). Therefore, despite the fact that they lie within the tropics, the basin floor and surrounding mountains of the Valley of Mexico and Tlaxcala fall within the category of tierra fría. In sum, an annual cycle of warm, wet summer seasons alternating with cool, dry winter seasons is found over most of Mexico, but there is remarkable

216

|

Appendix A

variation over even short distances. Latitude, altitude, and position relative to mountain chains influence the climate of individual regions. However, the rainfall regimes in the south exhibit a greater abundance of precipitation and little annual variability, whereas the north is characterized by rainfall and greater variability. The Yucatán Peninsula, for instance, would be much wetter had it not been a relatively flat limestone shelf. Much of the northern plateau receives less than sixteen inches per year, while the remainder receives less than twenty-four. These are arid and semiarid landscapes. By contrast, most of the south receives more than eighty inches per year. As a comparison of map 2 and map 3 shows, indigenous settlement patterns have long reflected this rough division of the rainfall and temperature regime: dense populations of sedentary farmers were found in the regions of predictable and abundant rainfall, with warm but neither hot nor cold temperatures, whereas mobile agriculturalists and hunters were found in the regions of unpredictable and sparse rainfall. Most settlement, both before and after the Conquest, avoided extremes and concentrated in the semihumid and semiarid regions, which received between twenty-four and forty-eight inches per year, such as in the region in and around Mexico City. Central Mexico was, and is, subject to a number of recurring climate hazards, most of which derive from the failed seasonal northward migration of the ITCZ. Decreased solar radiation and/or above-average warming of the equatorial Pacific, among other factors, can limit or delay the ITCZ’s northerly migration, resulting in the late onset of summer rains and overall reductions in annual precipitation totals. Unseasonal droughts, frosts, and winter storms (called northers) are common during years with a southerly ITCZ position. Seventy-three percent of volcanic eruptions with significant global sulfur emissions increase soil humidity to significant levels in either the first or second year after the eruption.2 ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation), the fluctuation of equatorial Pacific sea temperatures and migration of its primary warm mass within the equatorial Pacific, is a critical agent of global climate variability. Yet the correlation of ENSO with central Mexican climate events such as drought, pluvials, or frost is not as strong as previous characterizations of the Mexican climate have avowed. Indeed, dendrochronologist David Stahle and associates have argued that the link to central Mexico is relatively weak and unpredictable.3 The combination of unseasonal precipitation and cooler fall/winter temperatures can have disastrous effects on agriculture and human health. In other cases, prolonged rainy seasons with sustained cloud cover and reduced evapotranspi-

Appendix A

|

217

ration resulted in extreme wet periods (known as pluvials) that saturated soils, flooded rivers, and replenished aquifers, lakes, and wetlands. Not infrequently, such conditions coincided with crop diseases, harvest failures, and, at times, hunger. In the tierra fría zone, cold temperatures could cause frost in almost any month (except June and July, it seems) and could produce very substantial winter snow accumulations. Finally, hurricanes can track through the Mexican mainland, causing extreme rainfall events that overwhelm inland watersheds and devastate urban and rural environments alike. There are, of course, other types of climate hazards, such as hailstorms, high winds, extreme heat, or any type of unseasonal conditions that could, and did, produce health and biophysical dangers. Yet the frequency of these events is low, and evidence of their occurrence is scarce or nonexistent before meteorological instruments were common. None of these climate hazards follows a regular or predictable cycle from year to year or decade to decade. Significantly, interannual, multidecadal, and even century-scale variability of the Mexican climate punctuated life in Mexico, inflicting socioecological stress, mortality, and political strife. Such chaotic variability is sometimes referred to as “climate change,” a term that tends to suggest a shift from a normal to an abnormal climate. Instead, climate variability in Mexico, especially in colonial Mexico, tended to involve wild interdecadal oscillations between wet and dry, cold and warm, seasonal and unseasonal.

DENDROCHRONOLOGY The growth of some tree species in central Mexico is highly sensitive to soil moisture conditions in the summer growing season, which is, itself, highly dependent on precipitation from June to August. Less than two decades ago, because of the lack of dendrochronological sources in central Mexico, reconstructed precipitation patterns for this region had to be inferred from tree rings from northwestern Mexico, a highly flawed methodology given that precipitation patterns and drivers of climate variability in the two regions are highly disparate. This changed with the discovery and analysis of stands of Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), the tree rings of which were first studied by Matthew Therrell in his dissertation (2003) and subsequent articles (2004–6). Only starting in 2012 did David Stahle begin publishing dendrochronologies and reconstructed precipitation patterns derived from the Montezuma bald cypress (Taxodium mucronatum).4 The relevance of other species, notably pine (Pinus hartwegii), came to light with publications in 2007 and 2015, but cannot match

218

|

Appendix A

the former two for length of chronologies or correlation with precipitation in the Tlaxcala/Teotihuacán regions.5 The availability of tree-ring series located within a thousand kilometers of the central point of the study area varies by the period studied. There are fewer available for the deeper past than for more recent times. Eight different series, derived from three different tree species, cover the period from 1500 CE onward. By 1600 CE, the number of relevant tree-ring series is sixteen, and by 1700 CE, there are twenty-four, still dominated by the same tree species: Pinus hartwegii, Pseudotsuga menziesii, and Taxodium mucronatum. A recent paleoclimatological tool called the Mexican Drought Atlas— devised by dendrochronologist David Stahle and associates—employs a complex methodology to merge these multiple data sets and to construct a separate chronology for each point within a grid of 1,501 points, 651 of which are located in the modern republic of Mexico, dispersed evenly at 0.5 degrees latitude and longitude. Soil moisture conditions are calculated at each of these 1,501 points and are expressed as variances from the site-specific mean. Values are expressed within a seven-point index, ranging from –3 (much drier than normal at the specific site) to 3 (much wetter than normal at the specific site). This sitespecific index is known as the self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (herein referred to as PDSI), a standard tool to measure drought. Ultimately, what makes the Mexican Drought Atlas such a powerful analytical tool is that it provides a reliable estimate of crop health for any location in Mexico at any time between 1400 and 2012. Because climate varies so greatly from one part of Mexico to another, the determination of site-specific climate conditions is of critical importance to any assessment of historical climatesociety interactions. The Mexican Drought Atlas is a research tool—not just a paleoclimatological study—that allows users to delimit the proxy output by place and time. For instance, graphical outputs (i.e., graphs) show soil moisture variability through time at a certain grid point or as the average of a userdefined set of grid points. Cartographic outputs show variability through space at a certain year or as the average of a user-defined set of years. The tool is thus very powerful and the multi-series data derived from it are far superior to any single series.6 To construct the chronology for each point, the Mexican Drought Atlas uses a bimodal analysis. It includes up to eight tree-ring chronologies within five hundred kilometers and then moves to a larger climatic context, drawing up to another eight chronologies from within one thousand kilometers. The Mexican

Appendix A

|

219

Drought Atlas excludes tree rings beyond these distances. As can be seen in map 21, within the 500-kilometer zone, tree rings of Montezuma bald cypress dominate. In the 1,000-kilometer zone, Douglass fir tree rings dominate. The tree ring candidates for each grid point are given a power weighting based on the strength of their correlation to each of the grid’s geographic points. Because chronologies “turn on” and “turn off ” over the length of full six-hundred-year reconstruction, the assemblage is reassessed at twenty-five-year increments. This methodology, called Ensemble Point-by-Point Regression, provides good correlations with twentieth-century instrumental meteorological data in Tlaxcala and the Valley of Mexico, approximately r = 0.4–0.6.7 It should be noted, however, that the power weighting of some particular tree-ring chronologies, for some particular grid points, can be very high, causing the overall variability of PDSI in some places to be strongly determined by one or more tree-ring chronologies. This is the case for the chronology derived from core samples taken from Montezuma bald cypress trees at the Barranca de Amealco, Querétaro (the data set is referred to as BAM), located 140 kilometers from Mexico City. Because of the strong correlation of BAM with precipitation in Tlaxcala and the Valley of Mexico, and because the BAM chronology is one of only a few with data relevant to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the BAM chronology strongly determines PDSI variance in Tlaxcala and the Valley of Mexico. Map 22 reveals power weightings of between 70 and 90 percent in these regions in the period before 1670 CE. Such dependency on a single chronology should raise some methodological red flags and, while not forcing us to discard the Mexican Drought Atlas results, is a reminder of their possible weakness. A notable, and unexpected, anomaly in the BAM correlation is that it actually does a poor job at explaining climatic conditions at its own site. Because the ahuehuetes are riverine and palustrine species, their growth correlates with groundwater and fluvial base flow, rather than with direct overhead rainfall. Essentially, they tell us about hydrological conditions in their watershed, which is why they correlate so strongly with conditions near Mexico City.8 The Mexican Drought Atlas calculates PDSI values for each year for each grid point. PDSI values estimate the variability of soil moisture conditions, calculated at each of the grid points. In this case, grid points receive a value for each year that falls between –4 (extreme drought) and +4 (extreme wetness), depending on the growth of the trees that belong to the multi-member weighted ensemble of tree rings that is defined for each point.9 Because growth of both Montezuma bald cypress and Douglas fir species in Mexico has a strong

M A P 2 1 Candidate tree-ring series. This map shows the tree-ring series used in the Mexican Drought Atlas to reconstruct Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) for the grid point located at W 98.25º, N 19.25º, approximately 7.5 kilometers south of Tlaxcala City. The legend classifies (by shade) and quantifies (in brackets) the tree-ring series that were active at each hundred-year interval.

Appendix A

|

221

MAP 22 Correlation of Montezuma bald cypress chronology in central Mexico. This map shows the correlation between the Montezuma bald cypress chronology from the Barranca de Amealco (BAM) and reconstructed PDSI values for the years 1521– 1670. Dark areas without hatching indicate strong positive correlations. Dark areas with hatching indicate strong negative correlations. The graphic was produced by means of the Map– Correlation tool on the Mexican Drought Atlas website, comparing BAM tree-ring variance to reconstructed PDSI. Dorian J. Burnette, personal email communication, April 20, 2018; Stahle et al., “Mexican Drought Atlas”; Stahle et al., “Mexican Drought Atlas Signal-Free Tree-Ring Chronologies.” positive correlation with soil humidity in the summer months, copious rainfall in June, July, and August produce large rings, and delayed or reduced rains result in narrow rings.10 Thus, rain seasonality is more important to tree growth than total rainfall amounts. As David Stahle and associates explain: In Mexico itself, the radial growth of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and Montezuma baldcypress (Taxodium mucronatum), two of the principal spe-

cies used in the Mexican Drought Atlas, appears to frequently end during the canícula or the mid-summer drought that typically occurs in July and August (Magaña et al., 1999). However, heavy precipitation late in the summer sea-

son, including rainfall associated with landfalling tropical systems, can greatly enhance warm season totals and is capable of reversing long-term hydrological drought in some drainage basins (e.g., Nicholas and Battisti, 2008). Unfor-

222

|

Appendix A

tunately, these very late season rainfall events are not well represented in the Mexican tree-ring proxies.11

Thus, central Mexican dendrochronologies are difficult to translate into overall precipitation totals. Soil humidity is not primarily affected by total rainfall amounts but by rates of evapotranspiration (heat, sunshine, cloudiness, wind velocity, etc.) and the types of rainfall. Light, extended rain will generally result in higher rates of water infiltration in soils, while hard, short-lived storms might cause significant overland runoff and less infiltration. This poor correlation with total precipitation is only a problem if one wishes to understand the total hydrological budget of a region, especially relevant to the analysis of groundwater recharge and lake/wetland volume/extent. What central Mexican dendrochronologies do extraordinarily well, then, is to estimate soil moisture in the late spring and early summer, that is, precisely the season when rain-dependent crops sprout (May–June) and grow ( July–August). Therrell and associates found that tree growth predicted 69 percent of maize yield variability.12

T H E C O R R E L AT I O N A R E A Given the significant geographic differentiation of anomalous conditions in Mexico at any particular moment, this analysis addresses specific climatic conditions in the general region of the Valley of Mexico (where Teotihuacán and Mexico City are located) and the Zahuapan Basin in Tlaxcala. These are also two regions in which I have found and analyzed documentary evidence of climate variability. Map 2 defines this region using a rectangular polygon to enclose the space around the basins of Mexico and Zahuapan, a region I call the Correlation Area, from N 19º to N 20º and from W 98º to W 99.5º. The Correlation Area encompasses twelve grid points of the Mexican Drought Atlas. The mean of the twelve points is then used to compute a year-by-year PDSI series. This PDSI series is then compared with and correlated with the historical evidence. As map 2 makes clear, the study region lies at the center of the central settlement zone. Map 3 reveals the Correlation Area to be dominated by a temperate climate, which extends over much of the area of highest population density in colonial Mexico.13 The resulting graphical output (figure 26) reveals much year-to-year variability. The Year of Hunger in 1785 to 1786 is represented well, but appears less severe than the droughts of 1696 and 1702, and roughly equivalent to those

Appendix A

|

223

FIGURE 26 PDSI values for east-central Mexico, 1500– 1850 (i.e., the Correlation Area).

The data used in this graph was extracted from the Mexican Drought Atlas: http:// drought.memphis.edu/MexicanDroughtAtlas/.

of 1528, 1742, and 1750. The three driest years are 1696 (PDIS = –3.97), 1702 (PDIS = –3.20), and 1785 (PDIS = –3.15); the three wettest years are 1552 (PDIS = +3.66), 1816 (PDIS = +3.31), and 1610 (PDIS = +3.25). Also visible, however, are numerous PDSI trends: a Conquest-era drought, high humidity from 1540 to 1665—although interrupted by dry conditions from 1625 to 1635—and then a drying trend from 1690 to 1790 that was capped by a period of high humidity from 1792 to 1816. Such general trends can, and should, be periodized more formally, so as to avoid shifting definitions of “extremes,” “eras,” and even “decades.” If a clear and defensible definition of what constitutes a “dry” or “wet” year, or an extended sequence of them, is accepted, then such anomalies can be altered and fitted to suit the researcher’s argument. Table 6 shows eleven PDSI “extremes.”14 These are the only PDSI events in the Correlation Area between 1500 and 1850 that (a) are five or more years in length and (b) have a minimal average PDSI of one standard deviation (1.28) beyond the mean PDSI of between 1500 and 1850. Table 6 lists the eleven events in chronological order and gives their average PDSI. Another way to reduce the author’s subjectivity in defining events is to impose a standard duration, in this case ten years. This also facilitates comparison from one period to another because it eliminates variable duration as a mitigating

TABLE 6 PDSI extremes in Correlation Area. Chronological Sequence

Date Beg.–End

Duration Years (Rank)

Severity Average PDSI (Rank)

A B C D E F G H I J K

1514– 1528 1532– 1539 1542– 1554 1574– 1579 1604– 1616 1643– 1652 1696– 1705 1729– 1733 1785– 1790 1791– 1796 1809– 1817

15 (1) 8 (7) 13 (2) 6 (8) 13 (3) 10 (5) 10 (4) 5 (11) 6 (9) 6 (10) 9 (6)

– 1.36 (8) – 1.49 (5) +1.70 (1) +1.56 (4) +1.39 (7) +1.37 (6) – 1.70 (2) – 1.29 (11) – 1.36 (9) +1.35 (10) +1.64 (3)

Note: Basic statistics for the eleven PDSI extremes during the Spanish colonial era. PDSI values were treated as absolute numbers. Ties in rank (value parity) were decided by reference to event duration. In the modern era (post-independence), only the period from 1929 to 1934 would make this list, obtaining a duration rank of 9th and a severity rank of 5th (– 1.54). I do not rank fifteenth-century extremes because the data are less trustworthy and show exaggerated variability.

MAP 23 Eleven PDSI extremes during the Spanish imperium. PDSI values are classified into twelve indexed categories between – 3 (very dry) and +3 (very wet). Areas with white hatching indicate negative PDSI values. The Correlation Area (indicated by a black rectangle) is shown for context.

MAP 23 (continued)

MAP 23 (continued)

MAP 23 (continued)

228

|

Appendix A

MAP 23 (continued) TABLE 7 Six extreme decades. Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6

Years

PDSI

1545– 1554 1696–1705 1809– 1818 1516– 1525 1605– 1614 1643– 1652

+1.82 –1.70 +1.48 – 1.44 +1.41 +1.37

Note: These six decades are the only ones with an average PDSI exceeding one standard deviation (1.28). Data origin and processing for these images is replicated from the previous maps.

factor in defining event severity. Based on absolute PDSI averaged within the Correlation Area, the ten-year extremes are ranked table 7.

SPELEOLOGY Two stalagmite series exist for central Mexico: Juxtlahuacan Cave and the Cueva del Diablo. Map 24 shows the location of the caves relative to Tlaxcala and the Valley of Mexico and also shows the situation of their physical geography. Both sites are located along Mexico’s southern mountain chain, the Sierra Madre

Appendix A

|

229

MAP 24 Speleothem locations in central Mexico. Map showing speleothem locations and proximity to Teotihuacán, Tlaxcala, and Mexico City. Site labels indicate the site name and temporal extent of stalagmites in the cave. The speleothem from Cueva del Diablo does not cover the colonial era.

del Sur, an area far less densely settled than the Mexico City region. The sites are located about 180 to 240 kilometers from the Valley of Mexico. Yet only stalagmites from the Juxtlahuacan Cave provide data relevant to the colonial period. The stalagmites are processed along a growth axis, precisely dated and tested for oxygen isotope-18 levels at annual increments. Correlation with twentiethcentury annual precipitation totals in Mexico City is strong (r =–0.89), but only with some “fine tuning” of the stalagmite and meteorological data. Precipitation totals from May to November at the Tacubaya station (1878–1987) were smoothed over five years, and stalagmite values were offset nine years to account for a lag time of water traveling through the 160-meter epikarst layer above the cave.15 Lachniet and associates argue that long-term decreases in precipitation acted “as a primary control for the drying of springs and other environmental changes.”16 Although the speleothem records annual data, it fares poorly with short-term drought episodes, such as the droughts of the 1450s during the Mexica era. As Lachniet and associates admit, “these events were either not linked to multidecadal-scale water availability, or were too short to be recorded by our stalagmite.”17 Considering these factors, then, the Juxtlahuacan data best

230

|

Appendix A

represent multidecadal and century-scale trends. Figure 27 shows the long-term precipitation trends and figure 28 the colonial-scale trends. The second of these graphs (figure 28) shows dry conditions until 1550, then a twenty-five-year pluvial followed by normal conditions (ca. 1550–1625), followed by a twenty-five-year dry period (1625–1650), followed by a fifty-year near-normal precipitation period, and conditions from 1700 to 1800 that look mostly normal, except for pluvials at the beginning and end of the century. Over the course of these three hundred years, the trend was toward wetness. Note that the first graph (figure 27) shows a trend toward decreasing rainfall after 1500, but this only materializes if we begin at the pluvial maximum of 1450 and end at the height of desiccation in 1920. By shortening the temporal parameters, the hydrological conditions in the Valley of Mexico actually became more humid, according to Lachniet and associates. Interpreting the Juxtlahuacan precipitation chronology is plagued with difficulties. A simple visual comparison of the trends of this data with those of the Mexican Drought Atlas presents some broad similarities: a dry Conquest era followed by a pluvial, followed by a drought centered at around 1630. The late eighteenth century looks wet, as it does in the Mexican Drought Atlas. But many other aspects simply do not match up; the period from 1690 to 1720 looks very different, for instance. If we run the Juxtlahuacan data against the

FIGURE 27 Long-term precipitation trends in the Valley of Mexico. Data were accessed

and downloaded from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration paleoclimatological data archive. Lachniet et al., “2400-Yr Mesoamerican Rainfall Reconstruction,” 260.

Appendix A

|

231

FIGURE 28 Annual rainfall from 1500 to 1850 CE reconstructed from Juxtlahuacan speleothem and calibrated for the Valley of Mexico. Data were accessed and downloaded from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration paleoclimatological data archive. Lachniet et al., “Two Millennia of Mesoamerican Monsoon.”; Lachniet et al., “2400-Yr Mesoamerican Rainfall Reconstruction,” https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo -search/study/21019. Mexican Drought Atlas data in a formal correlation test—as is represented in map 25—we find no significant correlation at all (r = 0.035). This statistical test rejects any correlation at all and thus presents us with a completely parallel precipitation record. There is, however, another interpretation. The disparate temporal scales of these two proxies make it difficult to test one against the other. The Juxtlahuacan data are valid only at the multidecadal (quarter-century) scale, and even the century scale. The Mexican Drought Atlas data are valid at annual, multi-annual, and multidecadal scale. While the two nominally match up at the multidecadal scale of variability, the year-by-year statistical testing tool cannot recognize those longer trends in either data set, thereby generating a hidden error of timescale incongruence. Another factor complicates this comparison. As discussed above, each proxy records a different climate parameter. Juxtlahuacan measures total annual precipitation, while the Mexican Drought Atlas reveals early-summer soil moisture. As was seen with the statement from Stahle, the Mexican Drought Atlas misses out on major rainstorms in the late summer, often related to large tropical cyclones (i.e., hurricanes). Ultimately, the approach taken here is to focus mainly on the more refined, and more reliable, Mexican Drought Atlas–generated PDSI values, while still accepting some of

232

|

Appendix A

MAP 25 Mean Pearson correlation coefficients of Juxtlahuacan speleothem and the Mexican Drought Atlas reconstructed PDSI, 1540 to 1809.

the roughly half-century-scale precipitation trends indicated by the Juxtlahuacan chronology.

HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTIONS The third and final data set to add, analyze, and compare to the two proxies already discussed is the Agroecological Index, which I have devised to aggregate reported incidences of meteorological phenomena that adversely affected agriculture and food production: namely, drought, excessive rainfall, frost, snow, and hail. To these, I add reported incidences of “sustenance crises” (i.e., staple-crop shortages and hunger), which serve methodologically to enhance the signal of years with crop-damaging meteorological events and the year (or years) following harvest failures. The 106 discrete flood events recorded from historical sources were not added to the Agroecological Index because of the strong possibility of anthropogenic causes. Also recorded, but not included in the Agroecological Index, are additional indicators of stress in agrosystems, such as crop diseases, insect and rodent infestations, epidemics, epizootics, and more. Non–Agroecological Index biophysical phenomena were used to contextualize and enrich the accounts of years—or clusters of years—that the Agroecological Index or Mexican Drought Atlas highlight as exceptional. Data range from

Appendix A

|

233

1446 to 1810, although suspicious data lacunae exist from 1457 to 1502 and 1529 to 1540. After 1540, the longest gap is five years, from 1715 to 1719. The Agroecological Index thus begins only with 1540. It ends in 1809, the year before the Hidalgo revolt broke out. A simple scoring strategy was used to produce a year-by-year index, with values ranging between 0 and 5, in which each of the six classes of events (i.e., the five meteorological classes along with sustenance crises) could receive a maximum score of 1 for any particular year, even when multiple regions and/or multiple sources reported the occurrence of a class event.18 The individual class scores (equal to either 1 or 0) were thus summed, leading to a maximum possible score for any particular year of 6. The maximum score actually recorded was 5. Ten years received a count of 4 or 5: 1555, 1615, 1661, 1662, 1663, 1691, 1692, 1694, 1695, and 1697. The 1690s were extraordinarily bad. Between 1540 and 1809, 106 (39 percent) of 270 years did not report any events. In the remainder of years, there were 285 reported events that, when regional duplications were eliminated, were reduced to 164 class events. About half of those years had just one class event. These data are derived from a variety of archival sources, but mainly indigenous annals referencing events in Tlaxcala and Mexico City. Tlaxcala was situated at the center of an annals tradition that started before the Spanish conquest and lasted until 1739. The Tlaxcalan annals provide the best and perhaps the only long, continuous climate series available for colonial Mexico (excluding the physical sources such as tree rings). The tradition of recording significant annual events no doubt started in the pre-Columbian period by way of traditional indigenous writing systems. Annalists transliterated pictorial and ideographic accounts of “annals” within alphabetic traditions brought by Spaniards.19 The resolution of annals varies considerably, with some giving very detailed accounts TABLE 8 Summary of the Agroecological Index class counts. Total number of years (1540–1809) =

270

where annual class count is 0 = where annual class count is 1 = where annual class count is 2 = where annual class count is 3 = where annual class count is 4 = where annual class count is 5 =

106 81 51 22 8 2

234

|

Appendix A

of certain years, but mostly, as in the case of the Tlaxcalan series, mentioning only two or three significant events for an entire year and rarely giving specific monthly dates on which those events occurred.20 The length of such entries might be as short as a few words or as long as a few hundred words, with the vast majority of entries consisting of ten to thirty. Tlaxcala has the richest tradition of annalists, which Frances Krug and Camilla Townsend believe might be due to the privileges granted Tlaxcala for allying with Hernán Cortés in 1519–21. Krug discovered twenty-three annals series that belonged to what she called the Tlaxcala-Puebla “annals family,” of which fifteen were original (i.e., not verbatim copies) and of which eight originated in Tlaxcala. The Tlaxcalteca probably wrote even those from Puebla, given that most such annals derived from San Juan del Río, a place “where most of the migrants from Tlaxcala settled.”21 Historians of Tlaxcala can draw from three sources of annals. First, the National Library of Anthropology and History in Mexico City houses an important resource for Tlaxcala’s historical climatology (and other environmental history topics) in the form of seven annals in a series identified as the Anales antiguos de México (AAM), numbered 16–20. The AAM series are not originals but nineteenth-century Nahuatl copies made by Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca under the auspices of José Fernando Ramírez. Each is accompanied by a basic Spanish translation made by Chimalpopoca and a short introduction provided by Ramírez. Camilla Townsend provided a second series with an excellent translation into English.22 As gleaned from figure 29, CTAT is nearly identical to AAM 18.3. All AAM series and that of CTAT are of unknown authorship. Lastly, the Tlaxcaltecatl nobleman Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza produced a rich annals series from about 1660 to the late 1680s, which has been recently translated into Spanish and published with the Nahuatl text.23 The Zapata y Mendoza annals series (now preserved in Paris, France) is the richest known Nahuatl series for Tlaxcala and perhaps for New Spain in general. His annals have a known author and describe a diversity of events with often personal commentary. With the exception of a few ad hoc entries in the 1720s and 1730s, the reporting of socioecological phenomena in the Tlaxcalan annals ceases after 1697.24 There are no easy explanations for this rupture in the genre, but the events described in the annals themselves provide clues. As mentioned earlier, the 1690s was a period of unmitigated disaster: 1696 was the driest year on record, according to the Mexican Drought Atlas; epidemics ravaged the population in

F I G U R E 2 9 Scatter charts of Tlaxcalan annals. Each of the six geometric shapes rep-

resents the occurrence of a specific type of event during one year. “TX FLD” indicates a reported incidence of flooding of the Zahuapan River at Tlaxcala City. “TX EPD” refers to any widespread and severe outbreak of disease. “TX FST” and “TX DRT” indicate agriculturally destructive and widespread frosts and droughts. “TX SST” indicates instances of food shortages in Tlaxcala. “TX SNW” indicates a destructive winter snowfall event. Acronyms used spell out as: AAM, Anales antiguos de México; CTAT, Anales de Tlaxcala, transcribed and translated by Camilla Townsend; and HCCT, Historia cronológica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala by Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza.

236

|

Appendix A

FIGURE 29 (continued ) five of six years between 1692 and 1697; and famine developed between 1695 and 1697. Perhaps this demographic turmoil resulted in the death of many authors and, in a wider sense, contributed to the near dissolution of the genre. The 1690s might also have been a watershed in municipal governance. Men of common heritage, not noblemen, often led the Cabildo during the eighteenth

Appendix A

|

237

FIGURE 29 (continued ) century. The intimate link between the annals genre and rulership was thus broken.25 The annals set a high standard for socioecological information. They were written by indigenous noblemen holding political office. As officeholders, they were concerned with events of broad political significance: events that

238

|

Appendix A

would need (or needed) a government response. The annals recorded events that occurred over most of Tlaxcala and that affected a large part of the population. From a government’s perspective, these were events with high social and fiscal costs that would affect the financial position of the Cabildo. Remembering these events would help Cabildo officials construct arguments to fend off the royal exchequer when the indigenous government could not pay its share of tribute. This standard bias in the annals makes them an excellent proxy of events that had widespread and significant impact. For the eighteenth century onward, the Agroecological Index compiles data from alternate sources, ideally those that had the same bias of local government administrators. This was especially important for references to Mexico City and beyond. Citations are taken from cabildo (town council) texts while those derived from “private” texts (agricultural estates or particular people in litigation, for example). The primary sources for such supplementary materials is the Desastres agrícolas en México: Catálago histórico, a valuable two-volume catalog of such events compiled and organized by historical anthropologist Virginia García Acosta.26 The catalog gives multiple sources for every year, associating each source with a year, the place or region discussed, a direct quotation from the source, and keywords indicating which themes (drought, frost, floods, famine, disease, etc.) are being referenced. The spatialization of socioecological themes through time is thus one of the primary benefits and strengths of the source. Some care must be taken in using this resource, however. One considerable drawback to the Catálogo histórico is its uncritical use of existing compilations of such events. Many of the citations originate from secondary sources, not primary ones. For example, it includes many citations from Elsa Malvido’s 1973 study of Cholulan demography.27 Malvido’s chronology derives from a wide variety of secondary sources without individual citations. Those in the Catálogo histórico are sometimes at least twice removed from the original.28 In many cases, multiple citations of the same event often trace back to the same primary or secondary source, thus giving a false sense of density to the Catálogo. Figure 30 presents a graphical summation of the data. The Agroecological Index shows a high frequency and severity of class events between 1540 and 1715, especially between 1575 and 1630. The 1690s experienced the most severe Agroecological Index conditions of any decade of the colonial era. Considering the peak Agroecological Index event period, from 1540 to 1715, there were some relatively quiet periods, of ten- to fifteen-year durations, centered at 1570, 1635,

Appendix A

|

239

FIGURE 30 Variability of the Agroecological Index, 1540– 1809. 1655, and 1670. Mostly, however, the average class event count was between 1.3 and 1.0 per annum. From 1715 onward, on the other hand, the Agroecological Index reports far fewer events. Particularly good times, relatively speaking, were had between 1715 and 1730, 1755 and 1765, and 1790 to 1805. Over the last hundred years, the average class event count was between 1.0 and 0.8 per annum, about three-quarters of the rate experienced before 1710. Even though the SEI cannot be correlated with the instrumental meteorological record of the twentieth century—because the main body of historical evidence that it relies on expires with the end of the Spanish colonial administrative system—there is strong evidence to suggest that the Agroecological Index database and methodology has produced a reliable and valid chronology. Perhaps its underlying integrity can best be demonstrated through a cartographic correlation with data from the Mexican Drought Atlas. Map  26 presents the Pearson correlation coefficients (r) resulting from the statistical testing of the Agroecological Index data from 1540 to 1809 to the Mexican Drought Atlas reconstructed PDSI values from the same time period. The Pearson coefficient for the Correlation Area is 0.535. Not only is this a strong correlation, but the Pearson coefficient reaches its maximum precisely within the Correlation Area. The meteorological observations from Tlaxcala, Mexico City, and elsewhere, then, appear to be a good and accurate representation of the weather conditions they experienced, or at least the conditions experienced by trees, particularly ahuehuetes. While this is the result hoped for, it does go a long way to confirm the validity of the Agroecological Index.

240

|

Appendix A

MAP 26 Mean Pearson correlation coefficients of the Agroecological Index. The Agroecological Index is correlated to reconstructed PDSI in the Mexican Drought Atlas for the period 1540 to 1809

The correlation remains particularly strong along the axis of the Sierra Madre Oriental, specifically in its rain shadow as the moist gulf air is driven by the trade winds over the Mexican highlands. Another transect of correlation stretches to the southeast from Mexico City across the western part of the Mexican state (Estado de México), toward the city of Toluca and the lake region around the Valle de Bravo. There is a much weaker correlation to the remainder of the central settlement zone, particularly so in much of Michoacán (western central Mexico), and statistically insignificant along most of the Pacific coast and beyond the limits of the central settlement zone. Figure 31 presents another way of representing this correlation by superimposing two line charts, one from the Agroecological Index and the other from the Mexican Drought Atlas. Note that this chart has altered the Agroecological Index data so as to give it the same polarity (i.e., the same positive or minus values) as the Mexican Drought Atlas data.29 Of course, this gives a false impression that the Agroecological Index data has “negative” values, which it does not.30 The polarity function also gives the impression that the two data sets have identical, or near-identical, trends, which they do not. (Again, this is impossible since the Agroecological Index does not have negative-value events, only positive one.) The key to reading the chart, then, is to compare the depth of anomalies in the two data sets. In particular, depths that have incongruences of 0.5 points or more demand attention. With this in mind, we see generally

Appendix A

|

241

FIGURE 31 Comparison of Agroecological Index and Mexican Drought Atlas data, using the polarity of the Mexican Drought Atlas data.

congruent amplitudes, although dissimilarities can be seen circa 1570, 1650, and 1790. A climate-induced crisis can be deduced from the Agroecological Index data just as it had been for the Mexican Drought Atlas data. For this purpose, I define an Agroecological Index crisis as any period possessing a five-year sequence of adverse conditions (Agroecological Index ≥ 1.1, which is the 50th percentile or higher), interrupted by a maximum of one year less than 1.1.31 Table 9 shows the eight Agroecological Index eras that emerge from these criteria. It is a testament to the severe weather of this time that 63 percent of Agroecological Index values for years between 1540 and 1705 fell within the 50th percentile or higher. Between 1705 and 1809, the proportion of worse-than-normal years fell to 23 percent. Once again, the late seventeenth century—a period often called the Late Maunder Minimum—stands out as exceptional: thirty-one years with a stress index ranked only behind the much shorter (seven-year) event of the mid-seventeenth century. Again, the late eighteenth-century crises are revealed as shorter, less severe, and less frequent than those before 1705. The last aspect of the Agroecological Index data series that should be addressed is the temperature parameter that it measures, a subset of the larger Agroecological Index database. Historical climatology derived from historical documents is the only method available for reconstructing temperature variability in central Mexico. Temperature variability is especially visible in the Tlaxcalan data; Mexico City, on the other hand, is significantly more sensitive

242

|

Appendix A

TABLE 9 Eight Agroecological Index anomalies.

Begin Year 1542 1582 1612 1638 1659 1675 1747 1769

End Year

Duration (years)

Avg. Agroecological Index

Agroecological Index Rank

1556 1602 1630 1645 1665 1705 1751 1774

15 21 19 8 7 31 5 6

1.457 1.442 1.594 1.518 1.939 1.715 1.143 1.357

5 6 3 4 1 2 8 7

Note: The anomalies derived from the Agroecological Index were calculated with data smoothed by a seven-year running mean. The criteria for an anomaly was a minimum five-year period with a mean Agroecological Index of at least 1.1 (the 50th percentile of years). An anomaly could include no more than one year with a value below 1.1.

to drought than is Tlaxcala. While the two cities have almost identical average temperature maxima during their warmest months, Tlaxcala’s coldest month ( January) is two degrees Celsius cooler than Mexico City’s. Moreover, Tlaxcalan temperatures frequently went below freezing, causing between forty and one hundred frost days per year versus Mexico City’s twenty to twenty-four frost days.32 Admittedly, the type of temperature parameter that is measured by the Agroecological Index will not enable the reconstruction of mean annual temperature or any other such quantitative variable. Yet incidences of maizekilling frost and winter snow events (particularly in Tlaxcala) reveal cold trends. By contrast, all paleoclimatological proxies relevant to central Mexico provide a precipitation signal. The Agroecological Index is thus unique and important in this respect. Figure 32 shows cold reporting events in the Agroecological Index database and fits a smoothed line to the annual events in order to compare temperature variability in the Correlation Area. These cold periods identified by the Agroecological Index are, mostly, reproduced in Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. The newest such reconstruction identifies the three coldest decades of the last thousand years as the 1640s, 1601–1610, and the 1580s (ordered by severity, beginning with the coldest).33 Another study finds decadal-scale nadirs at 1815, 1455, 1695, 1605, and 1640 (again, ordered by severity beginning with the lowest).34 A third such

Appendix A

|

243

FIGURE 32 Agroecological Index cold variability, 1540– 1809. Agroecological Index cold

events can be frost or snow events. The graph represents Agroecological Index cold reports in two ways: The light gray columns represent a year with either frost or snow (receiving a value of 1) or a year with both frost and snow (receiving a value of 2). The black line smooths this data. It uses Agroecological Index data at ten-year increments (1540, 1550, etc.) in which values are averaged over a thirteen-year period. It then uses a cubic spline interpolation function to predict values between increments, thus resulting in a smoothed line.

multiproxy temperature reconstruction, by Ljundqvist and associates, finds three nadirs: in the 1690s, 1640s, and 1601–1610. Each nadir significantly exceeds all others in the last two millennia, with only the second half of the fifteenth century at all comparable with those of the seventeenth century.35 Ljundqvist and associates also compared their coldest decade with that of three other such studies. Their study and another identified the coldest temperatures in the 1690s (precisely, 1690–99 and 1692–1701); another highlighted 1641–50; and the fourth study recognized the decade from 1576 to 1585.36 Given this discussion of proxy data, it appears that the results of Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions published in the last fifteen years have converged, highlighting over and over the same five decades as significantly colder than all others, with only variations in their order. Reports of cold in the Agroecological Index concur with paleo proxies regarding the outstanding cold in central Mexico in the 1690s and the first decades of the seventeenth century. As in most reconstructions, those two periods—in that order—are the coldest on record. The third coldest in the Agroecological Index

244

|

Appendix A

database, however, is the mid-sixteenth century. This is also the most significant anomaly in the Mexican Drought Atlas reconstruction, ranking first in severity and second in length. It should be noted that the Ljundqvist and associates reconstruction also qualifies the mid-sixteenth century as probably the fifth or sixth coolest period, although its severity appears diminished because it comes between two of the deepest nadirs on record: the mid-fifteenth century and the early seventeenth century. If the Agroecological Index cold period in the midsixteenth century is not an outlier among proxies, the mid-seventeenth century is a more significant departure. Both the Agroecological Index and the Mexican Drought Atlas suggest the development of only a moderate cold/wet phase in the 1640s, although the Lachniet speleothem suggests a significant drought. This indicates that the 1640s—a period made infamous by Parker’s accounts of the global crisis at this time—had much less significance in central Mexico.37 Mostly, however, the Agroecological Index cold reconstruction exhibits broad parallelism with other temperature proxies. We can also compare these reported events of cold and precipitation in the Agroecological Index. Figure 33 offers such a comparison. To facilitate this analysis, the graph shows cold events classified into fifteen-year bin columns, from 1540 to 1809. Precipitation is shown as a single undulating line. Generally, the two data sets present the same trends, with six peaks (the highest of which

FIGURE 33 Reported anomalies of cold and precipitation in the Agroecological Index, 1540– 1809. The scale of the two vertical axes is 1:2, reflecting the 1:2 ratio of the average reporting frequencies of the two data sets.

Appendix A

|

245

occurs during the 1690–1704 period) and an extended nadir from at least 1705 to 1764. What stands out, however, is the nearly one hundred years of frequent cold anomalies from 1540 to 1645 in which only the period from 1570 to 1584 lacked exceptional cold. The forty-five-year period from 1585 to 1629 produced fifteen unique cold class events, occurring in fourteen years; thus, nearly one in three years had occurrences of exceptional cold. After the peak fifteen-year period from 1690 to 1704, the cold returned very infrequently. A comparison of the trends of the two parameters of the Agroecological Index also clarifies the uniqueness of the various climate periods. In order to facilitate this comparison, the scale of the two vertical axes was set at 1:2, reflecting the different value of total reported frequencies of cold and precipitation (57 vs. 120, respectively) over the entire period from 1540 to 1809. We find a four-stage division of the compared trends. Between 1540 and 1629, reports of cold anomalies were more frequent than reports of precipitation anomalies. In the second stage, from 1630 to 1705, the relative reporting of anomalies of the two parameters appears to be synchronized. In the third stage, from 1705 to 1780, reports of both types of anomalies fade out, although the rate of decrease in the temperature series far exceeds that of precipitation. Finally, beginning in the 1780 to 1794 period, and extending into the following fifteen-year period, appears a possible fourth stage in which the relative rates of the two sets converge once again. This trend would likely continue into the period from 1810 to 1824, which was strongly affected by volcanic activity, similar to conditions in the early seventeenth century.

Appendix B A Framework of Soil-Water Dynamics

T

he purpose of this appendix is to offer a framework of soil-water dynamics. Connecting mass soil movements with either climatic or human processes requires a clarification of their scale, their timing, and their spatial dynamics. Previous studies of environmental change have implicated hydrological and geomorphic transformations as proof of cause and effect without offering well-dated and well-located evidence.1 While chapter 4 provides such evidence, it leaves open many crucial questions about how—and how fast— soil is entrained, transported, and deposited at new sites. What is offered here, then, is not more evidence of changing flows of soil and water, but a model to understand erosion and sedimentation. Water does not simply move through or over the river basin; the two move together. Fluvial currents suspend enormous quantities of biotic and nonbiotic matter. Turbulent flows create a dynamic interplay and exchange of kinetic energy between suspended (moving) materials and stationary sediment of the channel or other soil surfaces over which water flows. The entrainment and transport of sediment modifies water flow, which in turn changes how and how much sediment moves. In what follows, I relate geomorphological principles of sediment transport and fluvial dynamics to the actual soil and water characteristics of the basins of the two study regions. I model hydrological change and identify the internal thresholds that can produce sudden and dramatic changes

Appendix B

|

247

in the hydrological network and fluvial regime. This model helps to interpret historical sources that speak to hydrological change.

THE EDAPHIC CONTEXT The long history of volcanism in central Mexico has fundamentally shaped the soils in both Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán, leaving behind sedimentary deposits that at times measure fifty meters. Since the late Oligocene (approximately thirty million years ago) volcanic eruptions have occurred in this part of Mexico. The most visible signs of volcanism are the giant strato cones of La Malinche, Tlaloc, Itzaccihuatl, Popocatepetl, and Pico de Orizaba, all of which have peaks between 4,000 and 5,700 meters above sea level. Less obvious, but perhaps more important, are the numerous long-extinct cinder cones that dot the landscape: especially those that follow a transect from Teotihuacán through Tlaxcala, the so-called Teotihuacán Corridor. The Cerro Gordo, for instance, located near the pyramids of Teotihuacán, is one of the largest such extinct cones along this transect, reaching about 3,000 meters. In many cases these ancient cinder cones still preserve their conical shape, but rise to only a few hundred meters above the surrounding valleys. As the volcanoes erode, they deposit large amounts of sediment in the valleys. The sediments and ancient cinder cones thus obstruct drainage from these low-lying areas. La Malinche (4,550 m) occupies the southeastern corner of the state of Tlaxcala, and its western flanks contribute runoff to the Zahuapan River. The flanks of Mount Tlaloc extend into both the Valley of Teotihuacán, where the outcrop is known as the Patlachique range, and Tlaxcala, where the outcrop is known as the Bloque de Tlaxcala. Both of the uplifted areas have small cinder cones and fault lines, with underlying sediments composed of ancient lacustrine sediments sixty-five million years old.2 Tectonic activity has exposed in places the underlying lacustrine sediments, which have higher-than-normal concentrations of both clay and volcanic silicates and lack the normal Holocene cap, a porous layer with a thickness of twenty-five to eighty centimeters formed in the current interstadial (