The Valley of stone rivers

When I was seven years old, my grandmother Alma would take me to the Zócalo Subway Station, where we would look at the scale models of Tenochtitlán. There, several feet below ground, in a noisy tunnel, it was difficult to imagine that Mexico had been a city filled with and entirely surrounded by water in a not so distant past. The subway was so hot and crowded that we would walk quickly to the exits, but I always wondered “What happened to all the water?”

Over the years, I have seen floods and droughts in Mexico City, and I’ve seen how rivers and lakes were turned slowly into dumps or were covered with concrete. One day I was talking to a friend and we asked ourselves about the water that still exists in our city. What was the relationship like that our grandparent’s generation had with water? What will the relationship between this precious liquid and the younger inhabitants of the city be like in the coming years?

Looking for information to answer these questions, we decided to visit the bodies of water that still exist in the Valley of Mexico. In a Housing complex near the Benito Juárez Airport we found a spring of sulphurous waters which is still used as a medicinal bath. That day we met Don Nacho, who has been working there as a bañero1 for sixty years.

Talking to him about his job and his relationship with water, we suddenly realized that there is a living generation of people who grew up, played, ate or saw their parents work in the rivers and lakes that were part of the landscape of Mexico City. These people experienced first-hand the transformation of the bodies of water. At that precise moment we understood that there are multiple stories about water in our city, and about the way the growth of the metropolitan area has led to the disappearance of its lakes and rivers.

In this manner we came to understand new ways of thinking about the city, about memory and about the ways we use and live with water. That was the point at which the idea of a documentary came to us, a documentary that, based on the memories of these people, now in their senior years, would explore the story of how water has been confined to pipes and tanks and has ceased to be a living part of the city.

As inhabitants of a city where water has had a difficult history, we would like to contribute to the reflection on this vital resource. We do not wish to make a social denouncement, but rather to preserve the memories of these people who witnessed how the city of water that their parents grew up in was transformed into a city of land.