A City on a Lake

In A City on a Lake, Matthew Vitz adds an important, compelling study to the burgeoning scholarship on Mexico's environmental history. At once also an urban history, a work of historical geography, and a political history of popular mobilizations and state formation from the 1870s to the 1940s, the book traces the rise and consolidation of a technocratic bureaucracy that dealt with efforts by working and middle classes of the Basin of Mexico to secure better housing and sanitation as well as to gain access to key natural resources. With the onset of the Mexican Revolution, the competing demands of different interest groups, Vitz argues, generated emancipatory opportunities for reducing inequalities and pursuing environmental justice—openings that were later closed by the exclusionary, capitalist priorities of postrevolutionary administrations.The book is based on meticulous, extensive research. Vitz's many sources consist of administrative and legal records housed in nine different archives, including the Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Histórico del Agua, in addition to a wide range of published primary sources, among them scientific studies in specialist publications such as the Revista Mexicana de Ingeniería y Arquitectura. This material is analyzed from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, primarily in urban political economy but also in geography and sociology. Vitz has also read widely in the secondary literature, particularly environmental and urban histories, for many different parts of the world. For the historiography on Mexico, though, Vitz identifies with the neopopulist school of state formation, and while he contributes vital new knowledge about environmental history, he does so, in part, to reveal the limitations of Cardenismo, which emerges as having been less progressive, coherent, and consistent in its political agenda, when it came to ecological justice, than has previously been thought.The book is organized first by chronology and then by a sequence of case studies. The first chapter, on the Porfiriato, charts the rise of scientific experts who espoused an “urban environmental imaginary,” in which they came to understand the city's relationship with its hinterland in terms of public health. To promote sanitation, experts called for the construction of sewerage systems, the extension of the water supply infrastructure, and the further drainage of what remained of Lake Texcoco. If these engineering projects failed to accomplish their goals, thwarted as they were by an uncooperative nature, they nevertheless established certain precedents, namely a reliance on experts to guide environmental programs in support of sanitation. Further precedents were established during the Mexican Revolution, including new legal and discursive mechanisms for citizens to insist that the government guarantee basic environmental rights, as discussed in the second chapter. From this foundation, the next four chapters move on to examine the history of competing popular claims and government priorities in several settings during the 1920s and 1930s: in the old, central neighborhoods of the capital, where residents sought better and more sanitary housing; in the hillside villages to the south and southwest of the basin, where cooperatives' demands for rights of access to forests required that they contend with conservation practices; in the lake areas of Texcoco and Xochimilco, where desiccation and the rise of dryland farming (as opposed to chinampa, or aquatic garden, agriculture) brought new challenges for local residents, especially as the expanding capital siphoned off ever more water; and in the growing, informal conurbations of Mexico City, where new forms of community organizing, in order to demand essential services and infrastructure, developed in tandem with the rise of government agencies such as the Department of the Federal District, all of which contributed to processes of what Vitz terms “urban state formation” (pp. 190–91). After co-opting new constituencies into its corporatist structures, Vitz argues, the Mexican government increasingly advocated pro-business policies in the 1940s. The last chapter follows the turn away from the fading egalitarian and democratic visions of the revolution to ever more exclusionary and exploitative environmental policies and practices.Within this narrative, Vitz makes room for many ironies, contradictions, and intricacies. He does well to eschew generalizations and avoid abstractions; at every turn he is scrupulous in identifying the individuals, communities, and agencies involved in specific aspects of historical change. One of this book's many strengths, then, lies in Vitz's skill in articulating the complexities of this history even as he fashions such a cohesive and engagingly coherent narrative. As such, the book would make for an excellent text to assign to advanced undergraduates. It deserves to find a much wider readership than that, though. This impressive, sophisticated analysis will be of considerable interest to historians and geographers, in particular, and will appeal to scholars interested in the politics of rapid urbanization and environmental transformation during the twentieth century

Bureaucracy · Discipline · Economic history · Environmental history · Historiography · Political ecology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Technocracy · Urban history · History · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics · Public Administration