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In A City on a Lake Matthew Vitz tracks the environmental and political history of Mexico City and explains its transformation from a forested, water-rich environment into a smog-infested megacity plagued by environmental problems and social inequality. Vitz shows how Mexico City's unequal urbanization and environmental decline stemmed from numerous scientific and social disputes over water policy, housing, forestry, and sanitary engineering. From the prerevolutionary efforts to create a hygienic city supportive of capitalist growth, through revolutionary demands for a more democratic distribution of resources, to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of a technocratic bureaucracy that served the interests of urban elites, Mexico City's environmental history helps us better understand how urban power has been exercised, reproduced, and challenged throughout Latin America.
List of Abbreviations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I. The Making of a Metropolitan Environment
1. The Porfirian Metropolitan Environment 19
2. Revolution and the Metropolitan Environment 51
II. Spaces of a Metropolitan Environment
3. Water and Hygiene in the City 81
4. The City and Its Forests 109
5. Desiccation, Dust, and Engineered Waterscapes 136
6. The Political Ecology of Working-Class Settlements 164
7. Industrialization and Environmental Technocracy 193
Conclusion 218
Notes 235
Bibliography 291
Index 321
Matthew Vitz is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.
"For Mexicanists, political historians, urban historians, and historians of planning, I suspect, Vitz's emphasis on the politics of planning and what it reveals about the Porfiriato, the revolution, and the Cárdenas years will be well placed."
– John R. McNeill, H-LatAm
"Matthew Vitz's work is a valuable and enjoyable contribution to a growing literature that takes seriously the way Mexico City's lacustrine past shapes its present."
– C. Lurtz, Choice
"The book will appeal to several audiences. Environmental historians of Latin America will appreciate the new approach through political ecology to an often-discussed region. Because the book outlines Mexican history from the perspective of its national capital in a clear accessible [...] manner, the topic may appeal to historians interested in a comparative approach in urban history. Water historians, meanwhile, will appreciate how the author acknowledges the social, cultural, and political influences that shape water management."
– Rocio Gomez, Canadian Journal of History
"Seldom are the city and hinterland, technocratic elites and popular groups, studied together – in Mexico or elsewhere – so Matthew Vitz's work is a tremendous contribution to the field of Latin American urban history and the history of urban planning. In the case of A City on a Lake, this integration is accomplished through widespread archival research and a sophisticated analytical lens that links the histories of capitalism, urbanization, and the environment. Historians of Mexico will surely profit from this approach."
– Emilio de Antanuano, Planning Perspectives
"Vitz draws from a rich collection of archival sources to illustrate a metropolis caught between a growing population extracting more and more resources from a still-viable ecosystem and a government increasingly run by technocrats [...] Given current global concerns about climate change, A City on a Lake is a welcome and valuable addition to environmental histories of Latin America and the world, as well as the history of inequality, which cannot be divorced from ecological perspectives."
– James A. Garza, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"A City on a Lake is an innovative and complex study of the social, political, and environmental dynamics of Mexico City's demographic and spatial expansion from the Porfiriato (1876–1911) through the middle of the twentieth century [...] A meticulously sourced and theoretically grounded study that will likely be influential across several academic fields."
– Christopher Woolley, The Latin Americanist
"Tracing the relationship of social and ecological change during Mexico City's crucial stage of development in the early twentieth century, A City on a Lake is the most compelling environmental history of modern Mexico City available."
– Christopher R. Boyer, author of Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico
"Matthew Vitz's focus on how the relationships among Mexico City's inhabitants and its ecology, the state, and developers played out in the process of urbanization is absolutely novel. To my knowledge, this is the first book to bring the generally rural-centered analysis of agrarian reform into the urban fabric, and its fusion of political ecology with a rich empirical history will be welcomed by Mexicanists as well as students of urban ecology and popular movements in Latin America. Conceptually and analytically complex, yet crisp and clear, Vitz's book offers us a new way to understand a familiar period in Mexican history."
– Vera S. Candiani, author of Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City
"Based on exhaustive archival research and engaging theoretically with new scholarship in political ecology and urban environmentalism, A City on a Lake adds critical new dimensions to the history of modern Mexico. Matthew Vitz transcends arid dichotomies between urban and agrarian history, and deftly interrogates the once-sacrosanct watershed of the Mexican Revolution. Like few other studies, A City on the Lake demonstrates how ecological transformation and the struggle for environmental rights factored importantly into outcomes of the Mexican Revolution's modernizing project of capitalist development. This exciting monograph should establish Vitz in the vanguard of Mexico's and Latin America's new environmental and urban historians."
– Gilbert M. Joseph, Farnam Professor of History and International Studies, Yale University
