Vera Candiani - "Cities with Clay Feet: Mexico City and Beyond"

Speaker

Vera Candiani 

Title

"Cities with Clay Feet: Mexico City and Beyond"

Abstract

For five centuries, the formerly lacustrine City of Mexico has been engineered as a hydrological experiment, its fate tied to the desiccation of its watery environment and a modern regime of relentless pumping of its aquifer. Today, it has become a megalopolis of 23 million inhabitants who live precariously on unstable clay, sinking at rates of up to 30 centimeters per year and facing life-endangering chronic flooding and water scarcity and contamination. This lecture traces the evolution of the city’s hydraulic infrastructures from the pre-Hispanic period to the present, treating them not as neutral public works, but as class projects embedded with the interests of ruling elites that have prioritized the protection of wealth and property over ecological balance and social equity. Notwithstanding their historical differences, the same process is repeating in cities like Tehran, Lagos, and Bangkok. Each faces its own crisis of subsidence and overpumping; each a product of class-driven urbanization and resource extraction. Can such cities reconcile with their environmental limits without sacrificing the poor? Is there a future beyond the pump-and-drain paradigm, one that centers democratic control over water and land, and reintegrates urban life with the ecosystems that sustain it?

Biography

Professor Candiani’s first book, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City, is about one of the largest and most complex environmental engineering projects in the early modern era, which aimed to desiccate the lakes that used to surround the City of Mexico. Driven by the question of why our surroundings look the way they do, this book studies the social priorities embedded in the various structures and technological decisions that comprised the drainage project. In the process, it explains how colonization actually worked on the water, land and biota (humans included). It won the Conference for Latin American History Elinor Melville Prize for best book in environmental history, and has be critically acclaimed in US and international journal reviews. Currently, she is working on a project about how European livestock became feral in Spanish America and the consequences this had ecologically as well as socially and economically, as diverse populations saw in them a ready common resource. Claims on the right to capture and use these animals came from all quarters and became conflictive as the wild herds dwindled or migrated. These disputes paralleled what was taking place with other commons, such as land, water and woodlands – a highly contested process of appropriation and exclusion that should be read within the context of broader enclosures globally that underpinned the rise of capitalism. This project is part of a broader investigation into the role of commons, and their peasant and urban plebeian claimants in the colonization of the early modern Atlantic. The ultimate aim is to provide a much needed broad and comparative explanation of key historical differences in class formation throughout the continent and in so doing better explain  the roots of enduring and epoch-changing peasant, rural and urban socio-political movements that characterize Latin America in contrast to North America.

Cost: FREE

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