Mexico's cistern of sorrows
The art museum (and terminus of an engineering marvel) where Mexico City celebrates its toxic relationship with water
One of the first pieces of slang I learned after moving to Mexico City was aguas. Aguas, as in “waters”, plural, does not mean agua, as in “water”, singular. Rather aguas means danger, caution, cuidado wey. The colloquialism dates back a hundred years or more, before the city had indoor plumbing. “Aguas!” someone would yell, quite considerately, as they tossed the contents of their chamber pot out the front door.
The citizens of Mexico City no longer toss their effluvia into the street. Instead, we flush our aguas negras into 6,000 miles of pipes, where it descends northward, beneath the mountains, into Mezquital, another valley. Long ago the farmers there, in their great prescience, negotiated usage rights for the city’s piss and poop. Accordingly, my aguas negras and my neighbor’s aquas negras and the rest of the city’s aguas negras fertilize a great many chili peppers, alfalfa, corn, beans, onions, and other vegetables—which then get sent back to the grocery stores and restaurants of Mexico City where the city’s residents (and flocks of digital nomads) enjoy them in their salads, beginning the cycle anew.1
Water has always been a problem in the Valley of Mexico
Hundreds of years ago, the basin of the valley held an endorheic lake. Water flowed in, but water couldn’t flow out. With no egress, melted snow and rainwater mixed with minerals in the rocky base layer and turned brackish. Result: shallow non-potable lake water on top, large non-potable aquifer below.
In the 15th century, the residents of México-Tenochtitlan solved this problem by building a system of dikes, flood gates, and spring water aqueducts, separating the salty water from the fresh.2
In the 16th century, the conquering Spaniards unsolved this problem by destroying the dikes and the flood gates and the aqueducts, spreading disease and pestilence.3
In the intervening centuries, residents dug increasingly deep wells to tap an increasingly empty aquifer. Finding water to drink has been a problem ever since.4
Today, about a third of the city’s water comes from the Cutzamala System. The first stage was built in 1951, taking water from the Rio Lerma outside the valley and pumping it up and over the mile-high mountains that surround Mexico City. Benefit: water for the city. Detriment: no water for the countryside.
Also a detriment: Over the decades, the Cutzamala System has expanded to tap more rives, causing more people in the countryside to lose access to water. When people in the countryside lose access to water they move to the city. When more people move to the city, the city needs to pump more water. But 40% of the water coursing beneath the city already leaks into the ground because reasons, and that leakage equals the amount of water used in Houston every year, which is crazy, all of this is all crazy, it’s been crazy for 600 years, it’s all entirely absurd.
Meanwhile, the city is sinking 20 inches per year and Mexicans lead the world in per capita consumption of bottled water sold by the likes of the Coca-Cola Corporation, Danone, Pepsi, and Nestle, each of whom have been awarded rights to tap (and pollute) Mexico’s waterways. When you buy bottled water in Mexico City—and you have to buy bottled water in Mexico City!—you are (unwittingly, unavoidably) increasing the likelihood that, one day, all water in Mexico will be privately owned.5 This is what happens when you pave over a lake.
If you happen to be in Mexico City and you’d like to celebrate our (literally) toxic relationship with water, you can take a brief pilgrimage to the second section of Chapultepec park to visit a one-room museum called el Cárcamo de Dolores.6 Opened in 1951, the museum was built to commemorate the entrance of water from the Rio Lerma to the city. At the time, the museum was a fully-functioning part of the water system where you could watch river water sluice past an immense, partially-submerged Diego Rivera mural. That water eventually damaged the mural, and so was diverted away to restore the (now very beautiful and also very dry) painting.
Entrance fee: about a buck fifty.
Just outside the museum, don’t forget to take a gander at Diego Rivera’s monument to Tlaloc, the Aztec god of water. He’s laying down in several inches of filthy water with his head raised, as if to avoid drowning, and his mouth wide open, as if to yell: aguas!
The Atotonilco water treatment plant, the world’s largest wastewater treatment plant that local ranchers protested against (because less shit equals fewer crops), now treats about 60% of the grime flowing out of Mexico City
The aqueducts brought fresh spring water from the hills of Chapultepec, a wooded area across the lake to the east. When you visit Chapultepec Park, the so-called “lungs” of Mexico City, you’re visiting the city’s original water source.
After destroying the Aztec aqueducts, the Spaniards built their own. They failed. They built some more. They lasted, for a while at least. You can see the remains of some of these Roman-style aqueducts today, most readily on Avenida Chapultepec and in between Section I and II of Chapultepec Park.
In the early 1800s, according to the author Kurt Hollander, the city held over 500 private, spring-fed water fountains, but only 28 public fountains. That disparity led to the business of aguadores who carried water in clay pots to paying customers around the city. You can see this updated tradition today with delivery guys bringing bottled water and blocks of ice to businesses around the city.
México ranks second in the world in per capita consumption of bottled water, now the single most profitable product ever sold. The major water brands in Mexico are Ciel (Coca-cola), Bonafont (Danone), EPura (Pepsi), and Santa María (Nestlé).
Cárcamo is an engineering term that literally means water sump or ditch, and dolores means sadness. Strange and strangely beautiful name for municipal infrastructure, but then Mexico has a long and peculiar relationship with el sentimiento de tristeza. On the other hand, Dolores may refer to a saint or virgin (e.g., La Virgen de los Dolores). The CDMX government offers no info, so lacking a documented reason I’m going to go with sad, everybody is sad.