along an aqueduct
A Local History of Xochimilco, Oaxaca
INTRODUCTION
to the exhibit
While I am Mexican, my family's roots are not in Oaxaca. From the fall of 2022 to the summer of 2023, with the support of Princeton’s Martin A. Dale '53 Fellowship, I stayed in this city as an “uninvited” guest. I had been drawn to Oaxaca out of a genuine, though not quite innocent, intellectual curiosity. Like others before me (both Mexican and foreign) I traveled south with a preconceived notion of Oaxaca and its people. Upon my arrival, I delighted in the sounds of a waltz from a public garden, marveled at the labor of Indigenous textile artists, and hunted for mushrooms and heirloom blue corn in dizzying outdoor markets. Yet, living in Oaxaca for ten months, I was also forced to confront structural and environmental issues that visitors often have the privilege to ignore. Oaxaca’s economy depends overwhelmingly on tourism, and if you visit the city as a tourist, you’re likely to see its brightest, best-painted face. This romanticized “magical” image of Oaxaca is projected and promoted by its tourism board and municipal government. But the reality is that Oaxaca, the capital of one of the poorest states in Mexico, is a city of deep-rooted inequity and divisions that are only being exacerbated by the influx of foreigners. This inequity is perhaps most visible when we consider who has regular access to potable water.
The purpose of this exhibit is to provide a glimpse of Oaxaca beyond the polished galleries, boutiques, and cafes. This is a window into one of city’s oldest neighborhoods: Xochimilco, a community defined by the contours of a colonial-era aqueduct that is fighting to keep its traditions and identity alive in the face of intensifying gentrification and the homogenizing forces of cultural commodification.
What follows is the interlaced story of the colonial-era San Felipe del Agua aqueduct and the neighborhood of Xochimilco. By tracing the disuse, decline, and degradation of the San Felipe del Agua aqueduct and centering the memories of Xochimilco elders, this exhibition aims to move past the facade of the timeless, magical tourist destination inhabited by picturesque natives and reveal a local history with urgent relevance in the face of mounting water crises across Mexico and the world.
A Xochimilco on Dry Land
Almost one hundred years ago, while walking the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico-City art historian Manuel Toussaint came upon a place both strange and familiar: the barrio of Xochimilco. Perhaps he was taking refuge from the summer heat under the cool stone arches of the city’s colonial aqueduct, when his mind began to wander, flipping centuries back to the origins of Xochimilco. How exactly did this piece of dry land come to be named after a lake, located hundreds of kilometers away, just outside Toussaint’s hometown?
Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint.
“They say that when Cortés populated the city of [Oaxaca], he brought a certain number of Xochimilca Indians, who made their homes at one end of the town, along the old aqueduct that supplies the liquid element. They still live there and their neighborhood is called Xochimilco. I imagine that their obsession with the water of their native homeland prompted them to look for it wherever they could find it, even if it was funneled into ducts.”
— Toussaint, Oaxaca. México Editorial "Cultura", 1926.
The original Xochimilco, on the southern edge of Mexico City.
Photograph by Emmanuel Eslava. Wikimedia Commons.
Under the command of invading conquistadors, the Xochimilca Indians had left their floating gardens in the Valley of Mexico to settle at the margins of Oaxaca City in the 16th century. They named their settlement after their swampy homeland. And so from this community of transplanted Indigenous people, a new Xochimilco was born — a Xochimilco on decidedly dry land, but just downstream from the springs at the summit of the Cerro de San Felipe. These very springs would feed the flow of the city’s aqueduct.
A Brief History of the
San Felipe del Agua Aqueduct
The construction of the San Felipe del Agua aqueduct began in the mid-1500s and continued in segments over the course of two centuries to around 1751, when its southernmost point, a water tank (which still stands outside the Carmen Alto church) was completed. During the colonial period, most land actually remained in the hands of Indigenous communities. Yet, early colonial water projects were financed largely by religious orders. Thus, access to water was controlled by city elites and wealthy planters, who diverted water into their large haciendas through the aqueduct and an auxiliary system of canals. Most independent Indigenous farmers in the region focused on economic activities that required less water, such as small-scale cattle raising and textiles, including the cultivation of silk and the bright-red cochineal dye. The residents of Xochimilco were weavers and subsistence farmers.
The inscription reads: "THIS WORK WAS COMPLETED ... THE YEAR OF 1751."
The water tank outside the Carmen Alto church.
The nineteenth century was a period of urban change across Mexico. Historian Édgar Mendoza García has examined how Oaxaca’s municipal government invested in the renovation of infrastructure and came to exert greater control over public health and labor. During this time, doctors, armed with new theories on germs and gastrointestinal diseases, expressed a growing concern over the aqueduct’s open-air ducts and the possibility of water contamination. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, the municipality hired a cast of local officials to supervise the regular cleaning, maintenance, and public use of the aqueduct and instituted fines for individuals caught “stealing” water. By 1903, the city required aguadores, men who delivered pots of water from the aqueduct’s public fountains to residences, to purchase and carry a city-issued badge with their portrait and other identifying information, including date of birth, height, skin color, and civil state. Copies of these badges survive in record books held at Oaxaca’s municipal archive. If you flip through these books, you’ll find the portraits and personal details of dozens of aguadores. Here or there, some entries featured the hurried scribbles of a city official noting the absence, death, or even dismissal of a certain aguador, but the personal voices and struggles of these men — their fears and dreams — never made it on the page.
The aguador ledgers made between 1903 and 1923 are kept in the Municipal Archive of the City of Oaxaca and are filled with pages like this one. For those who cannot visit the archive, this and other photographs appear in the book De oficios y otros Menesteres: imágenes de la vida cotidiana en la ciudad de Oaxaca.
Water carriers gradually disappeared as the aqueduct lost its utility in the twentieth century. With the arrival of electricity and the construction of a railroad that connected Oaxaca to Mexico City, the city’s population boomed and water consumption intensified. Oaxaca could no longer rely upon colonial-era infrastructure to meet the demand. Water would now be carried into homes, not through stone ducts or on the backs of men, but through a system of supposedly-sterile metal pipes. By 1913, residences were required to have running water as the city sought to raise both hygiene levels and tax rates.
From life source to MONUMENT:
Memories of the Aqueduct
“It is now a monument,” says Víctor Armando Cruz Chávez, an artist and writer whose family has lived in Xochimilco for generations. But, in the past, he assured me, the aqueduct was “very connected with community life.” Indeed, the aqueduct was not just a vehicle for physical sustenance; it functioned as a kind of aquatic, serpentine plaza that ran the length of the neighborhood. It was a meeting place — a public site for labor, recreation, and community. The people of Xochimilco depended on the aqueduct-fed public fountains for the water used in their homes, kitchens, orchards, and corrals. Yet, they also regularly left the confines of their homes to meet at a juncture of the aqueduct they nicknamed La Cascada (or “The Waterfall”). La Cascada was built over a slope of a small river that has dwindled into a mere stream. However, the imposing arches of La Cascada still stand. For some, La Cascada also served as a make-shift bridge; they crossed over it as they left Xochimilco for other parts of the city.
"La Cascada" still stands today.
During my time in Oaxaca, I interviewed elders in Xochimilco as I traced how a stone structure, once key to material survival, lost its practical use and became an ornamental backdrop. How do the elders of Xochimilco remember their forebear’s relationship to the aqueduct and how have they seen its meaning gradually change for themselves, their children, and grandchildren? What do these intergenerational memories of the aqueduct reveal about the rich social and economic history of a community and its evolving identity in the twenty-first century?
Doña Adolfina
Adolfina Martinez Jimenez, 91, recalls how people from the sierra would “walk downstream” along the length of aqueduct to sell their wares in Xochimilco. Near the base of La Cascada, housewives, artisans, and children made use of the currents and pools to do their laundry, stomp out the excess dye from threads, and splash about with friends and family.
Doña Pilar
In 1944 and 1945, Pilar Rafeal Perez Garcia, 86, was just a little girl when city workers blew up a section of the aqueduct to make way for the Cristobal Colon road, today known as the Carretera Internacional. She had grown up with legends of evil spirits, like La Llorona, roaming the deepest, darkest parts of the aqueduct, but her worst fears materialized when chunks of stone, propelled into the heavens by loud explosions, began falling around Xochimilco. Communal cries of “cuete, cuete” accompanied each detonation, but, of course, that was not enough to protect residents from serious injury. Some neighbors felt the wreckage of the aqueduct on their bodies. The aqueduct, as previously mentioned, had been falling into decline for some years, but this demolition effectively marked the end of its use as a water source.
La Llorona, outside a house in Xochimilco on the night of the Day of the Dead (November 2022). La Llorona is a spirit known to frequent bodies of water.
This southern part of the aqueduct was cut off from the northern side by the road's construction.
Don Amado
Amado Perez feels that the construction of the road essentially broke the barrio up, partitioning it into two. The side north of the road, where his ancestral home still stands, is closer to the source of the aqueduct, the natural springs atop the Cerro de San Felipe del Agua. This side, he argues, has clung to its identity. Then there is the southern side, which is closest to the city center. This side houses the most instagrammable part of the aqueduct standing today: the so-called arquitos de Xochimilco (or “little arches of Xochimilco”).
In this area known as los arquitos de Xochimilco, the pillars and arches of the aqueduct have been repurposed to serve as walls and doorways for homes and businesses. This repurposing of the aqueduct’s structure began as early as the 1920s, when the art historian Manuel Toussaint described finding refuge from the heat in one of these arches-turned-doorways. Today, however, you’re more likely to find a car under the arches as this area has become an unofficial, prime, parking spot. This side of Xochimilco, Don Amado claims, is not Oaxacan anymore.
Don Manuel
Manuel Dominguez, 85, remembers a time before the polychromatic murals and AirBnBs, when most of his neighbors were still farmers and weavers. What are his childhood memories of the aqueduct? “We always enjoyed it,” he replies, recalling evenings by an aqueduct fountain when his brothers would play guitar alfresco and his boyish admiration of the young men who dared to dive into the pools below La Cascada. What does he think of foreigners who have moved into Xochimilco: “They don’t have appreciation for our barrio… they have no roots here,” he says. He recognizes that Xochimilco has changed a lot, but the aqueduct, he argues, remains emblematic. It is what makes Xochimilco, Xochimilco. “You can go to any other barrio and they have many things… they can have very elegant hotels, but that does not reflect the richness of a barrio, ” Dominguez declares.
Don Manuel is alluding to Xochimilco’s traditional rival neighborhood Jalatlaco, which in the spring of 2023 was declared a “barrio magico”or “magical neighborhood” by the state government. Elders often smile as they remember the rivalry between the barrios of Xochimilco and Jalatlaco. Those in Jalatlaco used to tease the Xochimilcans, calling them “pedreros” (or stoners) after the distinctive green-stone of their beloved aqueduct. The old residents of Jalatlaco were mostly tanners and leather workers and elders still remember there was nothing magical about the distinct smell of hides that once filled their neighborhood. The “barrio magico” program is sponsored by the state government and is modeled after the "Pueblos Mágicos" (Magical Towns) tourism program created by the Mexican federal government. While this program has helped boost the economies of rural areas, increases in foot traffic have also brought gentrification, environmental degradation, and the “Disneyfication” of historical places, pushing townspeople to project a picturesque facade that feeds into the desires and cravings of the tourist gaze — and is often unreflective of their local history and traditions.
THE AQUEDUCT
today
How did something so familiar and intimately tied to a city’s material survival become a curious backdrop?
The aqueduct continues to serve as a symbol of a distinct communal identity that separates Xochimilco from the rest of the city. Yet, since the construction of the road, Xochimilco, like the rest of Oaxaca, has only become more connected to a wider world.
Community elders’ memories of the aqueduct paint it as a kind of stretched out plaza, where the community once came together to enjoy flowing water, yet today the aqueduct has lost this function and has instead become a reminder of the ways tourism — a phenomenon that pushes people to seek encounters with the foreign, novel, or magical — has become deeply ingrained into local economies and shaped the commodification of traditional spaces and heritage sites. Community leaders have voiced concerns over environmental degradation and the displacement of local families. Still, renting to foreigners — tourists, digital nomads, and expats carrying dollars and euros — can be quite lucrative for a few. In a place like Oaxaca, where tourism is the biggest industry and economic precarity abounds, it is difficult to resist the commodification of traditional spaces. Even the so-called “protection” of cultural heritage sites often prioritizes private profit or the comfort of paying tourists over local historical significance or the accessibility of heritage spaces to descendant communities.
More broadly, the aqueduct reminds us that unequal, colonial structures persist, even if in vestiges. The increasing commodification of water and the alienation of Indigenous peoples from the land and its natural resources only serves the profit of elite Oaxacans and the pleasure of global North tourists. It is easy to see the aqueduct as nothing more than a microcosm of city's wider environmental crisis and deep-rooted inequity, but as the elders of Xochimilco remind us, the aqueduct, like their neighborhood, carries a story of perseverance and of life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bustamante Vasconcelos, Juan. “Introducción e inicios de la distribución del agua en la ciudad de Oaxaca. Principales personajes que intervinieron en la obra." Acervos: boletín de los archivos y bibliotecas de Oaxaca, vol. 3, Enero – Marzo 1999. (Casa de la Ciudad, Biblioteca Andres Henestrosa)
Bustamante Vasconcelos, Alberto. El barrio de Xochimilco en Oaxaca. Casa de la Cultura Oaxaqueña, 1989. (Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova)
Mendoza García, Édgar. “Abastecimiento de agua potable e higiene pública en la ciudad de Oaxaca, 1867-1915,” en La ciudad de Oaxaca: pasado, presente y futuro, editado por Carlos Sánchez Silva. Monterrey, N.L. [México]: Agencia Promotora de Publicaciones, S.A. de C.V., 2016. (Biblioteca Pública Central “Margarita Maza de Juárez”)
Overmyer-Velázquez, Mark. Visiones de la ciudad esmeralda: modernidad, tradición y formación de la Oaxaca porfiriana. Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, 2010. (Biblioteca del Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca)
Riley, Michael Brian. “Liquid Inequity: Historical Drinking Water Crisis in Oaxaca De Juarez, Mexico.” Georgia State University, 1996. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/liquid-inequity-historical-drinking-water-crisis/docview/304289013/se-2.
Taylor, William B. Landlord and Peasant In Colonial Oaxaca. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Toussaint, Manuel. Oaxaca. México: Editorial "Cultura,” 1926. (Biblioteca Fray Francisco de Burgoa)