Urban Globalization and its Historicity: The Case of the Global Sanitary City in Mexico in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Medicine and sanitary engineering were applied gradually during the nineteenth century as solutions to the terrible conditions of life and habitat that prevailed in the cities of the capitalist world—but also with the purpose of regenerating the human work force necessary to reproduce wealth. This essay shows how this global sanitarian effort was applied in Mexico City during the government of President Porfirio Díaz (1876– 1880, 1884– 1910), exemplifying the conceptions and prejudices about health, disease, environment and urban government shared by Mexican elites and their international peers, and with which they justified reforms aimed at controlling and disciplining nature and the social environment. During the inaugural ceremony of the Mexico Valley drainage system on March 17, 1900, Mexico’s president General Porfirio Díaz—on his fifth term in office—declared it “such an important and transcendent occasion for our future that it has to be registered in the annals of the Mexican people beside and at the same level of our independence day” (“Una de las más grandes fiestas del progreso. Inauguración de las obras del Desagüe”, El Popular, México City, 19/3/1900). The Drainage Project, set out in 1886, consisted of a main conduit 47.58 km long and between 5 and 21 meters in depth, which spanned from the San Lázaro gate through the Guadalupe range towards Lake Texcoco, where it twisted towards the west, traversing diagonally Lake San Cristóbal and a portion of Lakes Xaltocan and Zumpango, to finally connect to the ovoid (10,021 meters long, 4.28 meters high and 27–98 meters deep) Tequisquiac tunnel, through which the waters flowed through the Tequisquiac river and finally to Atilalaquia, to be used to generate power and irrigate land in Actopan, in Hidalgo state. Residual waters went to the Tula River, a branch of the Pánuco River, from which it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, south of Tampico. Its main goal was apparently to get Mexico City’s water and sewage out of the valley, while preserving the valley’s drinkable water. Sergio Miranda Pacheco, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) OpenAccess. © 2018 Sergio Miranda Pacheco, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-017 In the mindset of the Mexican president, the significance of such a gigantic hydraulic infrastructure being tantamount to that of Mexico’s independence, doubtless stemmed from the fact that both enterprises had liberated the Mexican people from, on the one hand, oppression from the Spanish Empire and, on the other hand, from material harm to its health and prized possessions from the constant flooding that for centuries ravaged Mexico City and other nearby valley communities. Consequently, from this standpoint, at the onset of the twentieth century, Mexicans faced a very promising future: they belonged to a sovereign and independent nation, and under Díaz’s leadership, they had vanquished the dictatorship of the environment, thus placing themselves in the sphere of progress and modernity, just like the United States and any nation in Europe. Henceforth, Mexico would have the modern water supply and disposal systems required to improve the material state of public health in the capital. Yet, from another standpoint, the conception and completion of the Mexico Valley drainage works may be interpreted as an updating and modernization of a material, technical and environmental scheme supported by an absolute political power (such as Díaz’s), through which the elites had since colonial times enforced and tried to control the social, political and environmental milieu, so as to reproduce and increase the own wealth along with the income of their firms, situated in Mexico City and allied to the regional, national and global markets. By then, urbanization had become capitalism’s main force for economic, social, political and environmental change, and cities were not just stages of capitalist modernization, but means and gears of the new globalization of wealth making. Nevertheless, driven by the recent industrial development of production systems and the dramatic impoverishment of workers and peasants upon which it stood, throughout the nineteenth century cruel realities dwelt within cities, constituting severe conflicts and threats to the reproduction of capitalist wealth. Along with class conflicts, political struggles and revolutionary outbreaks, nineteenth-century elites agonizingly lived and faced the conflict between health and wealth existing in most countries, as the world raced toward an urban civilization during the nineteenth century. As Bruno Latour says, by the middle of the century the battle between health and wealth had reached a breaking point: The consumption of human life as fuel for wealth production led, firstly on English cities and henceforth on other European cities, to an actual energy crisis. Men, as it was often and widely stated, were of bad quality. That could not go on. Cities could no longer be death chambers and sewers, neither do the poor go on being miserable, ignorant, surrounded by vermin and infectious vagrants. The reactivation and broadening of exploitation (or prosperity, for that matter) demanded a better educated and cleaner population, well ven226 Sergio Miranda Pacheco