MEXACOMSLOGY JOURNAL

M EX ACO SMOLO GY

The following journal is a collection of short essays that cover various aspects of Mexico City’s urban and water history, from ancient cosmology to modern infrastructural challenges.

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Intro

Words by:

Grace Gardine r Dan i el la Mau re r Tal ha Zu lqarnain Yousef Alsh arif Sel i n Akad Wi l l i am McNe il Mat thew B ell Nandi n i Sath e e sh Benjam in Tu rk

Mexacosmology

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Enduring Cosmologies: Tenochtitlan After Spanish Colonization

Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Aztec empire, and for the Mexica people, it was the center of the cosmos. From the orientation and organization of the city, to the construction of infrastructure, and to the rituals enacted by the Ancient Mexica people, there was an intentional understanding and reverence for their place in the cosmos, and how their bodies were situated in space within this cosmological frame. The design of the ancient Aztec city was not merely functional but a cosmological expression rooted in Teotl, the sacred animating force of natural phenomena. Myth, ritual, and space worked as an integrated system that affirmed the Mexica worldview and their perceived place at the center of the universe.

Following the Spanish conquest, this cosmological order was disrupted, though not erased. Tenochtitlan endures as more than a marvel of architecture and agriculture. It stands as evidence of the Aztec ability to embed cosmology and identity into the urban planning and structure of their city. Considered a hybridity of the two cultures, this was seen through the emergence of Tequitqui art.

Indigenous artisans, responsible for much of the construction of early New Spain, embedded their symbols, techniques, and cosmological ideas into Christian churches, open air chapels, and civic structures.

Despite Spanish conquest, the persistence of these cultural elements reveals how deeply the Aztecs’ worldview and understanding of their place in the cosmos shaped their environment. Tenochtitlan’s legacy is not only its physical achievements, but their ability to preserve certain elements of their cosmological culture even in the face of European influence and colonization.

Words by:

Grace Gardi n e r

Images by:

De Agosti ni P ic tu re L ib rar y, Re co n s t r uct i o n o f C o n s e c ra t i o n C e re m o ny o f t h e Te mpl o Ma j o r

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Law of the Indies and the Christian Grid

Mexacosmology

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Death, and Dedication: The Xoloitzcuintli as Ritual Agent in Teotihuacan and the Aztec

Dogs—especially the Xoloitzcuintli—were not peripheral to Mesoamerican life but central ritual and architectural agents whose presence shaped how cities like Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan were conceived, built, and sacralized. Far from being simply livestock or companions, dogs mediated the thresholds between worlds: ethnohistoric accounts describe them ferrying souls into the underworld, while archaeological evidence situates them along architectural boundaries, beneath floors, in tunnels, and within dedicatory caches. Burial 6 at the Moon Pyramid reveals this with striking clarity. There, dogs, wolves, coyotes, and hybrids were placed deliberately at corners and edges—sites of transition—while eagles and big cats marked sky and earth, turning the pyramid into a cosmogram animated by non-human beings. The management, hybridization, and captivity of these canids show intentional ritual preparation, suggesting that animals were essential tools through which Teotihuacan elites activated architecture as a living cosmological organism.

Yet this sacred agency was not exclusive to the state. Across Teotihuacan’s barrios and later in Aztec neighborhoods near the Templo Mayor, dog burials appear in domestic floors, drainage canals, workshops, and lineage shrines—evidence that everyday residents participated in the ongoing spiritual maintenance of their built environment. These household rites echoed monumental ones, embedding dogs into the micro-architecture of daily life and reflecting a worldview that resisted strict boundaries between food animal, companion, sacrifice, and deity. By the Aztec period, the dog’s threshold role intensified: placed beneath stairways, doorways, and funerary spaces, they guided both buildings and bodies into the sacred. Across time and scale, dogs emerge as fundamental urban actors whose presence reveals how Mesoamerican societies understood architecture as intertwined with cosmology, and how the sacred city was co-produced by human and non-human beings alike.

Words by:

Dani el la Mau re r

Images by:

Nawa Sugiyama 2 0 2 4 , Bu r i a l 6 L ayou t o f C a n i d e s, Fel i n e s, a n d E agl e s i n rela t i o n to hu ma n s

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Death, and Dedication: The Xoloitzcuintli as Ritual Agent in Teotihuacan and the Aztec

Mexacosmology

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The Politics of Water in Ancient Mexico: Wetness, Power, and the Making of Kings

In the Valley of Mexico, water shaped political power in fundamentally different ways for Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan.

Teotihuacan treated land and water as inseparable. Its springs, canals, and wetlands formed a shared environment that no one could control or claim. Because water remained diffuse and unbounded, political authority stayed collective. The city had no kings or royal monuments, and after a rupture around AD 300 it eliminated elite symbols and invested in thousands of similar high-quality apartment compounds for the whole population. Power remained distributed across neighborhood councils rather than concentrated in a single figure.

Centuries later, the Mexica founders of Tenochtitlan used the same lake system but transformed its meaning. They created sharp divisions between land and water through large-scale engineering projects such as dikes, causeways, chinampas, and aqueducts. These works were portrayed as the personal achievements of the tlatoani, who was said to conquer dangerous water deities. By converting pervasive wetness into a measurable and taxable resource, the Mexica made hydraulic control the basis of royal authority. Concepts like atl-tlachinolli linked water mastery with military victory, reinforcing the ruler’s cosmic mandate.

The contrast between the two cities shows that hierarchy was not predetermined. When water remained an undivided, shared medium, political power stayed collective. When it was separated and controlled, power became centralized in a single ruler.

Words by:

Tal ha Zu l qar n ain

Images by:

Mexi can Cul tural Ins titu te D C, T h e o r i g i n s o f Maya C iv i l i sa t i o n ( Na t i o na l G e o g raph i c)

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The Politics of Water in Ancient Mexico: Wetness, Power, and the Making of Kings

Mexacosmology

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Law of the Indies and the Christian Grid

Urbanization is derived from Latin root “urbs” (city) and the suffix “-ization” (denoting a process or action), in conjunction this reaches our modern definition of the word: the process of becoming a city.

This was first coined by the Catalan engineer and planner Ildefons Cerdà in his landmark 1867 work General Theory of Urbanization.For Cerdà, Urbanization was a deliberate, systematic design framework, however while in this pursuit of modern efficiency, Cerdà’s concept implicitly referenced a powerful historical precedent for systemic planning that was anything but neutral: the colonial framework The definitive realization of systematic spatial order in the New World was established by the Laws of the Indies (1573), which dictated the geometric transformation of indigenous settlements like Tenochtitlan into colonial Mexico City. The city was conceived around a central plaza, the heart of civic and religious authority, from which a rigid, orthogonal grid of manzanas (blocks) would radiate. The Cartesian order physically replaced sacred canals and temples, with the symbolic authority of European buildings constructed directly atop the ruins of the Templo Mayor. This grid was the architectural apparatus of imperial control, designed to ensure legibility, facilitate surveillance, centralize power, and enforce a new social order, effectively replacing Indigenous cosmologies with a universally applicable, easily governable framework.

The critical nexus between Cerdà’s modern Urbanization and this colonial history is revealed in his own phrase: “The Spaniards brought to the new world a Christian civilization with an urbanization that was suitable to that civilization.” Cerdà’s use of “Christian civilization” refers not only to religion, but to the entire social, moral, and hierarchical worldview of European authority.

The colonial grid was the spatial expression of this civilizational superiority. His belief that geometric order inherently produces moral and social improvement is a direct, secularized echo of the colonial assumption that the grid is fundamentally civilizing and ethical, carrying the unacknowledged legacy of the Christian Grid into the heart of modern planning theory.

Words by:

You sef Al sharif

Images by:

Il defons Cerdà, Pla n o f t h e E i xa mpl e Ni colas de Fer, Pla n d e la f a m e u s e e t n ouvel l e v i l l e d e Mex i que

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Law of the Indies and the Christian Grid

Mexacosmology

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Where the City Remembers Water: Subsidence and Urban Vulnerability

Mexico City’s relationship to the ground beneath it begins with the history of its basin—once a connected network of shallow lakes that shaped how the region held water, soil, and settlement.

As these lakes were gradually drained and built over, the city inherited a foundation marked by deep lacustrine clays in the old basin and firmer volcanic soils along its perimeter. These two soil types respond very differently to the pressures of urbanization.

The fine clays, rich in water and highly sensitive to changes in moisture, compress significantly when groundwater is withdrawn; the volcanic deposits remain comparatively stable. Over time, this contrast has produced an uneven surface across the metropolitan area, where some districts sink rapidly while others barely move. The result is a landscape shaped by both material fragility and historical intervention, reflecting the long transition from lakebed to megacity and the reliance on groundwater that continues to draw the basin downward. In many neighborhoods, these shifts register quietly in tilted buildings, fractured pavements, and infrastructure that must continually adjust to a settling terrain.

The metro reveals these dynamics with particular clarity.

Lines built across the softest clays face persistent deformation as tracks misalign, joints stretch, and elevated structures manage loads and angles never fully anticipated by their original design. Lines running over volcanic ground tend to remain stable, producing disparities that mirror long-standing social and geographic divides.

In the eastern and southern districts—where clay layers are thickest and reliance on public transit is greatest—closures, slowdowns, and structural concerns have become familiar interruptions to daily movement. The 2015 Oceania crash, and 2021 collapse of Line 12, for example, underscored how unstable soils, construction practices, and uneven oversight can converge in parts of the city already shaped by limited investment and heightened vulnerability. Here, subsidence becomes more than a geotechnical condition: it shapes mobility, safety, and the lived experience of navigating a city still settling into the imprint of its former lakes.

Words by:

Sel i n Akad

Images by:

Dr. Andy Sow te r, Su b si d e n ce Ra te Da t a Dar ío Solano ‐ Ro jas, S e g m e nt o f E l eva te d Mex i co C i t y Me t ro

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Where the City Remembers Water: Subsidence and Urban Vulnerability

Mexacosmology

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Labor Exploitation and the Deep Drain Monument

Mexico City’s history is shaped by a long effort to control water. The Mexica worked with the lake environment through dikes, canals, and chinampas, creating a system that balanced human settlement with the natural conditions of the basin. The Spanish approached the landscape differently and treated water as something to be conquered. Their attempt to drain the lakes required enormous amounts of Indigenous labor and caused long-term damage to both the land and the communities forced to carry out the work.

This pattern continues in the modern era as the city sinks due to groundwater extraction and the drying of the former lakebed, turning water management into a constant struggle.

The Deep Drainage System of the 1970s is part of this ongoing history. It was built to stabilize the city and move wastewater out of the basin, but it relied heavily on workers who faced extremely dangerous conditions underground. Their unrecognized labor paid homage by the Monumento del Drenaje Profundo by Ángela Gurría.

Five tapered concrete pillars appear to burst out of the earth, their bases carved out to emphasize a deep anchoring in the unstable soil.

Resting on four of the pillars are large, open pipe segments that expose their interiors to the sky. One pillar stands empty, a sign that the work in resolving the issues of subsidence and exploitation are ongoing.

Placed in a neighborhood marked by sinking ground and environmental vulnerability, the monument points toward the communities most affected by Mexico City’s infrastructural decisions. It reveals how the city depends on the labor of those who maintain an unstable landscape and how the struggle to control water continues to reproduce long-standing inequalities.

Words by:

Wi l l i am McNe il

Images by:

Kati Hor na, Ho m e na j e a l o s Tra ba ja d o re s d el D re na j e Pro fu n d o

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Labor Exploitation and the Deep Drain Monument

Mexacosmology

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NAICM, The Airport That Couldn’t Take Off: Mexico City ’s Modern Creation Myth

This paper explores the development and cancellation of the New International Airport of Mexico City (NAICM) as a recent entry in Mexico’s longstanding struggle to dominate the waters of Lake Texcoco. Drawing on Barbara Mundy’s history of water in the Basin of Mexico, the essay argues that NAICM functioned as a modern (re) creation myth–one in which technological ambition and globalist aspiration tried, and ultimately failed, to impose order on what planners viewed as an unruly ecological region, one that could supposedly be transformed into the cosmopolitan metropolis of the future.

First, through an analysis of the rhetoric of the Foster + Partners promotional materials, the paper examines the contradiction between broader aspirations and the site’s materiality and history.

Then, through an analysis of the Arup Group’s engineering reports, it shows how the lakebed’s unstable soils, subsidence, and hydrologic conditions undermined the project’s viability, despite its international pedigree and ineffective appeals to national prestige.

The airport’s cancellation—and the subsequent flooding and emergence of wetlands on the site—reveals the persistent power of the environment in shaping urban futures. Moving forward, Mexico City’s development cannot rely on controlling, extractive models of infrastructural domination over water and nature. Instead, the city should embrace emergent symbiotic approaches—such as the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park—that understand water, land, and human life as interdependent systems.

Words by:

Mat thew Bel l

Images by:

Pu bl i c Domai n, Vi ew o f NAIC M Fou n da t i o n Román Meyer Falc ó n, Vi ew o f Fl o o d e d NAIC M S i te

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NAICM, The Airport That Couldn’t Take Off: Mexico City’s Modern Creation Myth

Mexacosmology

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Politicization of Water: The Cutzamala System and the Rise of Mexican Hydrocracy

The state hydraulic mission of Mexico City can be traced back to the conception of the altepetl of Tenochtitlan. Here, water management through large-scale hydraulic engineering projects was as fundamental to the creation of the sacred city as its monumental architecture. It also marks the beginning of the long-standing struggle for control over water and nature in the Laguna Valley that is still ongoing and unresolved, 700 years later. The valley, comprising present day Mexico City has seen an uninterrupted chain of largescale hydro-engineering projects that has wrought critical ecological consequences. The control over water became deeply intertwined with the notion of political conquest for the Aztec Triple Alliance and the Spanish colonization that followed marked the point of no return by draining the lakebed to build up Mexico City. Current ecological problems of subsidence, drainage, drought and floods are the ramifications of the weaponization of hydraulic engineering.

This paper investigates the evolution of hydraulic engineering as a political instrument during the autocracy of Tenochtitlan and later Spanish colonizers, to its predominant instrumentalization in the present day Mexican Hydrocracy through the Cutzamala System. Since its development in the late 1970’s the system has caused widespread ecological distress through droughts, pollution, river disruption etc., all to supply Mexico City with water while depriving indigenous communities. The displacement of the Mazahua community is chief amongst this. By controlling their water, Mexico City has essentially extended political control over territories outside its domain, through the reprisal of a hydraulic regime based on the colonial extraction of indigenous land, raising questions of indigenous rights to water.

This paper investigates the instrumentalization and politicization of water in Mexico City, its complex history that has weaved itself into modern governance and the implications of this hydraulic system through the lens of the Mazahua community and the Cutzamala system.

Words by:

Nan di ni Sathee sh

Images by:

Mar i o Vasquez, Sy m b ol i c a r m e d p rote s t by Ma z a hu a wo m e n aga i n s t t h e Cu t z a ma la Sys te m Cesar Rodr i gue z, D rou ght co n d i t i o n s i n Va l l e D e B ravo

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Politicization of Water: The Cutzamala System and the Rise of Mexican Hydrocracy

Mexacosmology

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Water, Infrastructure, and Cosmolog y in the Basin of Mexico

The Basin of Mexico has long been shaped by two opposing water philosophies: Indigenous reciprocity and colonial control. For the Mexica, water was a sacred, cyclical force integrated into agriculture, settlement, and cosmology. Their chinampa system—raised fields supported by canals, Ahuejote trees, and constant dredging, created a modular, adaptive landscape that worked with seasonal fluctuation.

These infrastructures stabilized hydrology, sustained biodiversity, and reflected spiritual beliefs about water’s generative role. Scholars such as Ebel and Mundy emphasize that chinampas embodied a collaborative relationship between human labor and ecological processes, embedding cosmology directly into spatial practice.

Spanish colonial engineering introduced an opposing logic, treating water as a threat to be drained and disciplined. The Huehuetoca Cut (1607), a massive trench designed to divert water out of the basin, exemplified this shift: its rigid form severed wetlands, centralized hydrological control, and relied on coerced Indigenous labor. As Candiani notes, the Desagüe asserted imperial power while destabilizing long-standing ecological systems, contributing to problems like aquifer depletion and land subsidence that persist today. Contemporary chinampa restoration in Xochimilco demonstrates the continued relevance of Indigenous, adaptive water management, while the legacy of colonial drainage reveals the limits of extractive approaches. Together, these histories show that infrastructure expresses cultural values, and that a resilient future for Mexico City requires re-aligning water management with the regenerative, cyclical logic of its Indigenous past.

Words by:

Ben jami n Tu rk

Images by:

Pla n o f t h e E i xa mpl e George Stei nm e tz, C h i na mpa s o f Xo ch i m i l co i n Mex i co C i t y

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Water, Infrastructure, and Cosmology in the Basin of Mexico

Mexacosmology

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