In attempting to understad the course of events leading up to Tenochtitlan’s destruction and it's being rebuilt as Mexico City, it would seem prudent to look at the available narratives of those who had participated in the event, or had “been there.” Cortes’ letters and the anonymous account written in Nahuatl by an anonymous author of neighboring Tlatelolco provide some evidence in accounting for how the city’s destruction happened – it goes without saying that these are both highly subjective accounts. In the case of Cortes, it is quite clear that who his audience is and who he is trying to please (namely, King Charles III).
Hayden White reminds us that “when it comes to the task of storytelling, whether in historical or in literary writing, the traditional techniques of narration become unusable” – if narratives are not sufficient as tools for remembering an event, what are? One approach might be to understand these narratives as “fictions” and how can these fictions help us understand the themes of colonialism from Cortes’ time that persist to the present? Might environmental fictions be understood as the de facto truths associated with the environment (water, infrastructure, nature) and their technologies available at a specific period in time?
Ivonne del Valle describes how the Spanish were only able to construct the fiction of sovereignty through violence, yet were unable to master in such short space of time the intricacies of water management, she notes “each flood must have reminded the colonial authorities of their uncomfortable position as masters of a place they could not manage” (p.217) illustrating the paradox of power over a people, but not necessarily the knowledge to control its setting (the newly founded Mexico City).
The Evolution of Cities Infrastructure
What does the contemporary map tell us about Mexico City? Felipe Correa’s Mexico City: Between Geometry and Geography reveals the most extensive geometric imposition of human rationality on the landscape: infrastructure. These transportation infrastructures are illustrated on the micro, neighborhood, city, and regional scales. The many networks are interconnected. And those networks—especially juxtaposed to the Cortes’ narrative of conquest—appear at first glance to be a refreshingly objective or straightforward explanation of how the city has developed. Here, instead of narrative as text, Correa creates infrastructural images of stacked diagrams and renderings. However, the neutrality is itself a graphic narrative of the dominant city morphology. Instead of mapping the informal or the lost, the memory or the imaginary—creating thickness of all sorts—the map articulates its own formalized specificities. The map is itself a fiction generator.
Water and the Idea of Progress
The idea of progress is intimately entangled with water issues in Mexico City. In Joel Simon’s “The Sinking City,” Simon reveals how, due to water extraction from underground aquifers, the city has steadily been sinking over past decades – in some places as much as a foot a year! In his article, he traverses the theme of progress, industrialization, and both economic growth and environmental degradation. As a reader, we transition away from being at the bird’s-eye-view with Correa, we are now on the ground with Simon, literally following the infrastructural pipes out of the city and back to their sources. He travels the city for clues and builds a case about the terrible impact of population growth on air and water quality, which he contrasts against the backdrop of local pride in a modernizing Mexico. The apparent subjectivity of his account – feigning scientific accuracy amid patronizing claims against local cultural norms begs one to question; is the current model of environmentalism a neocolonial paradigm?
As already mentioned, one of the most important things to keep in mind about the “historical” accounts of Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo are his own motives for writing them. Even both accounts (Cortés y Bernal Díaz del Castillo) have different purposes. Cortés is trying to justify his disobedience of starting his expedition to Technochtitlán while Bernal writes his account of the conquest The True History of the Conquest of New Spain almost thirty years after the events in order to leave his own legacy including himself as participant of the conquest. While Cortez portrays himself as the only hero of the conquest, Bernal acknowledges a collective effort of other indigenous groups and Spanish explorers.
ReplyDeleteWithout naming it, in the first section, you’re questioning the foundation of modernist-positivist rationality, ideology, scholarship and thought. If we can’t construct a narrative of a historical event, but only fictions, then there must be no single truth of that event, but only a collection of truths (or fictions).
ReplyDeleteYet, in the second section, you embrace a totalizing modernist-positivist framework by identifying objectivity in a seen-from-above map of infrastructures. In Hegelian fashion, the ‘progress’ that these infrastructures represent can also be understood as regressive destruction.
The third section returns to the (unstated) idea of multiple truths, yet falls into the very human-vs-nature trap/framework that leads to unsustainable and contradictory environmentalisms.
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DeleteIn " the sinking city" Simon critiques the environmental degradation of the cities aquaducts arguing that the city's moves towards so-called "progress" have destroyed the lake and now the city is eating itself into a black hole. He contrasts Mexico City to the empire of Tenochitlan, sucking the resources from its neighboring states and maintaining its centralizing power. He attempts to bring in the prophecies of Aztecas of an apacoloyptic day where the city is destroyed through earthquakes. His analysis of Mexico City, troubles me and something about the way he discusses the indigenous past of the place and weaves it into his critique make me wonder if a critique of Los Angeles could be similarly made. I wonder why it is easy to frame a critique of cities we don't live in or come from in such a way. As I read over it, he could easily be describing Los Angeles, taking into consideration the way that Beverly Hills consumes more water than other parts of the city. Should we critique Beverly Hills as a centralizing power consuming the resources, water and low-wage labor, of the rest of the city. Should we also consider what the Tongva would say about the centralizing power of Beverly Hills or of Los Angeles in general? What about the LA River being drained and covered in cement. The consequences of destroying and rebuilding is a theme we saw on how Bunker Hill was leveled erasing the geography and the community that lived there before to create what we have today. I think maybe this piece would have benefitted with a contrast or comparison of environmental degradation in other U.S cities.
ReplyDeleteTo echo Teo's crtique on the myth of objectivity and our positionality as scholars who might be falling in the traps of totalizing positivists and modernist frameworks, I want to pause for a moment and engage in LeighAnna's discussion on L.A.'s own, Beverly Hills. Like LeighAnna posed, should we critique BH "as a centralizing power consuming the resources, water, and low-wage labor of the rest of the city." To that effort I answer yes.
DeleteReading Correa's text and specifically his proposition on the light-train to Santa Fe as a (band-aid) solution to the transportation problem faced by those that commute to that alien part of town, made me think of L.A.'s very own band-aid solution: the 2 bus, aka, "the nanny bus." As many of us know, the city of Beverly Hills offers no public transit (other than a old-fashioned Hollywood-esque tourist trolley) for its residents or in-city commuters. How a low-wage worker gets into Beverly Hills is another story. Usually service and low-wage workers would need to carpool (without a license and in the face of the menacing checkpoints), bike (if you are physically able to), or ride the 2 bus that runs through the edges of Sunset Blvd. I want to concentrate on the issue of public transit, low-wage labor, and accessibility to a wealthy part of a city by the people who work it. And to this end, I'm bringing the case of Santa Fe into the picture. Like 90210, Santa Fe offers no formalized public transit to that opulent part of the city. The same story goes, how one gets to Santa Fe is a whole other story. You can try and carpool, bike, or ride the pecero. I know many people, among friends and family, who commute into the lush and Irvine-looking Santa Fe. Friends and family members spend at least half of their shift commuting from and to their places of work. These people, who make use of the pecero are young professional who use Mexico City's public transportation as their main source of mobility around the city. When I visit them, every night after work, they will share a story about how dangerous or how much they feared riding the pecero at night. My female friends fear not mugging (as materials are replaceable), but physical attacks. Living in fear simply to put food on the table is inhumane, as we already know. In my experience, being a person who has had the need to visit Santa Fe for a variety of reasons (in car) was beyond a headache and traffic nightmare. Think 405-south on a friday afternoon before a long-weekend. Only that in Santa Fe, it is traffic jam every day. With this in mind, and going back to the infamous (and problematic) "nanny bus", as totalizing Correa's proposition's may be, he is only echoing the needs of his (?) city: the dire need for public transit into Santa Fe. We may take a certain "objective" stand and take issue at Correa's light-train idea, but maybe if we ask day-to-day commuters how say, a light-train may impact their lives in a positive way, might texturize our discussions. Why are we so bothered by a light-train into Santa Fe, but we fail to see the big orange bus that runs right north of Perloff Hall? My effort here is not to completely agree with Correa, but more, to have us pause and re-think about a band-aid solution. I think the root of the issue is not the solution to the band-aid problem itself, but the fact that we have to recur to "band-aid" solutions. This only makes evident the fact that the problem is embedded in the system, and to change that, structural changes need to occur, that will then allow for sustainable solutions to flourish. The issue at hand is not Correa's myopic propositions, but the system in which he is embedded and has to work with.
The map as a “Fiction generator” is especially relevant to the research that UHI is conducting on the topic of thick mapping which aggregates and composes many more layers of information simultaneously on a single surface. While any single map throughout Correa’s work may appear refined almost to the degree of a diagram, it is most meaningful to look at the work as a sequence of maps. In this way, the map becomes a curated narrative that selectively chooses data to convey an argument with an “objective” appearance. This may not be as much a criticism of the work but rather a comment that supports this post’s assertion that the map, and any map, is by its nature a fiction generator.
ReplyDeleteIn thinking about the perspectival nature of conceiving and mapping space, I did some digging and came across these: http://www.abiroh.com/en/seeing-the-invisible/750.html
ReplyDeleteThey are not quite on our subject matter, but are nonetheless quite inspiring.
In response to the idea of progress, Mexico City is suffering from prosophobia, where its pride in modernity is the impeding obstacle that limits Mexico City’s opportunities for productive urban growth. The city’s fear in progress is rooted from their reluctance for change in their modernal attitude, which disregards the welfare and future of human life and caters towards the creation of monumental infrastructural projects to advance its boastful image of modernity. Without considerations to teleological consequences, Mexico City continues to develop disregarding its most valuable resource: water. Mexico City need to rethink their attitude about progress or else the city will be, as Simon states, “condemned forever to be a city on the brink.”
ReplyDeleteNarratives are by nature subjective whether or not they are completely fictitious or an account of an actual event. Thinking about these readings/issues in terms of scales might be one approach. Cortés has a background and motives that affects his narrative. This narrative is an account rooted in the fact of the destruction of Tenochtitlan; yet it is only one of many narratives told of Tenochtitlan’s history. Cortes’ narrative in conjunction with other narratives gives a better understanding from multiple sides. There is a part to whole relationship. Parts of a story support common themes of destruction and colonialism.
ReplyDeleteFelipe Correa’s maps are subjective the same way the text as narratives are subjective but it’s important to keep in mind Correa’s process for generating this map. Similar to Cortes’ motive for his account (for King Charles III), Correa has motive for generating the maps/project the way he did. The maps are a birds’-eye-view; however he also never left the ground. The scale of the overall map would be difficult to create and retain its intelligence had he not focused on the smaller scale situations that comprise it. Correa’s maps can be viewed as just a part of the whole story of Mexico City or it can be viewed as his own subjective whole containing parts he gleamed from the city. It is important to see Correa and his work not as a large scale plop of infrastructure onto an area but as a carefully considered move based on exploration and research into effects and potentials of the project.