Naturalizing modernity: Urban parks, public gardens and drainage projects in Porfirian Mexico City

Mexican Studies - Estudios Mexicanos

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 101-123

  Wakild, Emily ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

Drainage; Environmental history; Gardens; Mexico City; Modernity; Nature; Parks; Porfiriato; Public works; Urban space

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249140313     PISSN: 07429797     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/msem.2007.23.1.101     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. Ramona Pérez Bertruy, "La constitución de paseos y jardines públicos modernos en la ciudad de Mexico durante el Porfiriato: Una experiencia social," in Los espacios públicos de la ciudad siglos XVII y XIX, edited by Carlos Aguirre Anaya, Marcela Cávalas, María Amparo Pos (Mexico: Casa Juan Pablo, 2002), 314-334
2. Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz: Profiles in Power, (Great Britain: Pearson Education, 2001), 163
3. Claudia Agostoni, Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876-1910, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003), 32. She provides the figures that the lakes shrank from 1575 square kilometers in 1325, to 95 square kilometers by 1891
4. For example, more than 19,000 kilometers of railroad track were laid during this period, most of it paid for by foreigners. Henequen production increased tenfold, coffee plantations emerged, and mining production doubled in the northern states. Robert M. Buffington and William E. French "The Culture of Modernity," in The Oxford History of Mexico, edited by Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley, 397-432 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 416
5. Jonathan Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City (New York: Random House, 1988), 354
6. Ramona Isabel Pérez Bertruy, "Parques y jardines públicos de la Ciudad de México, 1881-1911" (PhD diss., El Colegio de México, 2003), 3
7. David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), xix, 11, and 188
8. Information on Olmsted and Central Park is extensive; for an introduction see Elizabeth Stevenson, Park Maker: A Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (New York: Macmillan, 1977)
9. Laura Wood Roper, Flo: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1973)
10. and Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), especially 138-259
11. Celina Fox, ed., London: World City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
12. While London lacked the beauty of Paris, its enormity and grandeur solidified its stance as the great imperial city; see Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
13. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4-7
14. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1999)
15. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)
16. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
17. Many scholars address issues of a modernizing Porfirian era but overlook these reconfigurations. In addition to the seminal works by Daniel Cosio Villegas, Paul Garner's biography of Porfirio Díaz provides an important starting point for any investigation into the era. Charles Hale's work goes beyond the focus on the president and argues that the period's Liberalism reflects a set of philosophical ideas proclaiming the triumph of science. Charles Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989)
18. William Beezley's consideration of the lives of ordinary Mexicans and the antagonisms between traditional and elite culture provides illustrative examples to understand the period. William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico. 2d. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
19. Various authors, including Lane Simonian, Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, and Joel Simon make the environment their explicit topic of study. Lane Simonian, Defending the Land of the Jaguar: A History of Conservation in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)
20. Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, Tierra profanada: historia ambiental de México (Mexico: Colección Divulgación, 1987)
21. Joel Simon, Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1998). Two brief articles about the Porfirian period address environmental topics
22. Emilio Kourí's investigation into the liberal Lerdo Law that stripped Indian communities of their lands reexamines Andrés Molina Enríquez's ideological underpinnings for promoting Indian land holdings. Emilio Kourí, "Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfiran Mexico: The Unexamined Legacies of Andres Molina Enriquez," Hispanic American Historical Review 82:1 (Feb. 2002), 69-117
23. Similarly, Herman Konrad's assessment of Porfirian tropical forestry policies argues that forest policy provided an extension of liberal reforms like the Lerdo Law. Forested lands turned over to the state and then privatized led to increased exploitation of tropical woods. Herman Konrad "Porfirian Forest Policy," in Changing Tropical Forests: Historical Perspectives on Today's Challenges in Central and South America, edited by Harold K. Steen and Richard P. Tucker (Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1992)
24. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, "1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario, "Journal of Latin American Studies 28 (1996): 71-104
25. Pérez Bertruy, "Parques y jardines públicos."
26. Laura Angelíca Moya López, La nación como organismo: México su evolutión social 1900-1902 (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco, 2003), 91, 103
27. Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3, 171-219. Voekel's examination of the Catholic Church, state, and society surrounding the rights associated with death lends insight into the rise of the modern individual in Mexico
28. Kandell, La Capital, 372
29. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism, 27
30. Franco, Plotting Women, 80
31. Carlos Díaz Dufoo, Limantour (Mexico: Eusebio Gomez de la Puente, 1910), 9
32. Díaz Dufoo, Limantour, 302
33. Garner, Porfirio Díaz, 102
34. While many varieties of trees were used to reforest the park, including Australian casuarinas and eucalyptus as well as European acacias, the ahuehuete drew special pride as it was a majestic native tree, and in 1910 the students of the national forestry school voted to make the ahuehuete the official national tree. "El Ahuehuete o Sabino: El Arbol Nacional," México Forestal 1, no. 9-10 (1923): 1-4
35. Miguel Ángel Fernández, "Limantour's Garden," Arqueología Mexicana 10, no. 57 (September-October 2002), 87
36. Report on the Valley Drainage Works and Sanitation Works of Mexico City, November 1, 1896, (Mexico: Junta directiva del desagüe y saneamiento, 1896), 1
37. Miguel Angel de Quevedo, Relato de mi vida. (Mexico: unknown, 1943) 1-13
38. Gilberto Serrato, "Algunos antecedentes acerca de la campaña de Protección Forestal en Mexico y breve relato de las actividades desarolladas por la Sociedad Forestal Mexico, C.L.," México Forestal 17, no. 7-12 (1939): 62-66
39. Quevedo, "Resoluciones de los Congresos Internacionales de Higiene," 19-24
40. Félix Fulgencio Palavicini, Biografía de Miguel Angel de Quevedo:Libro grandes de México (Mexico: unknown, 1961), 16. Fulgencio was the owner of the newspapers El Universal and takes credit for dubbing Quevedo as the national tree apostle
41. Miguel Angel de Quevedo, Espacios libres y reserves forestales de las ciudades: su adaptación a jardines, parques, y lugares de juego: Aplicación a la Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico: Gomar y Busson, 1911), 1, 31
42. Christopher Sellars, "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History," Environmental History 4 (October 1999), 486-514
43. and Susan D. Jones "Body and Place," Environmental History 16, no.l (January 2005), 47-49
44. For complaints about flooding as dirty and destructive, see a summary of the works undertaken by the Paseo commission, October 1883, Archivo Historico del Distrito Federal (hereafter AHDF): Ayuntamiento, Paseos y Jardines, vol. 3589, tomo 4, expediente 265. For a description of the severity of dust storms, see Luiz C. Curiele, May 1, 1879, AHDF: Ayuntamiento, Paseos y Jardines, vol. 3588, tomo 3, expediente 220
45. Pérez Bertruy, "La constitucción" 3l6, 332
46. Olga Cano "Travelers' Guide to Chapultepec," Arqueología Mexicana 10, no. 57 (September-October 2002), 91. Cano notes that Chapultepec is the largest urban forest in Latin America
47. Amparo Gómez Tepexicuapan, "The Gardens of Chapultepec in the XIX Century," Arqueología Mexicana 10 no. 57 (September-October 2002), 86
48. Edward C. Butler, "México," Los Angeles Times, 11 September 1904
49. Fernández, "Limantour's Garden," 87
50. Fernández, "Limantour's Garden," 88
51. Tenorio-Trillo, "1910 Mexico City," 96, footnote 70
52. Quevedo, Espacios libres, 17
53. Adas, Machines, 260
54. Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 329-332
55. Pérez Bertruy, Parques y jardines públicos, 233
56. Pérez Bertruy, Parques y jardines públicos, 258
57. Gilberte Serrato, "Algunos antecedentes acerca de la campaña de Protección forestal en Mexico y breve relato de las actividades desarolladas por la Sociedad Forestal Mexico, C.L." México Forestal 17, no. 7-12 (1939): 62-66
58. Antonio H. Sosa, "La influencia de Francia en el desarrollo forestal de México." Mexico Forestal 16, no. 9-10(1936), 73-75
59. Estela Eguiarte Sakar "Los jardines en México y la idea de ciudad decimonónica" Historias 27 (October 1991- March 1992), 130
60. Julio Prado, El apostol del árbol, Vol. 1 (Mexico: Emilio Pardo e Hijos, Legión de Divulgación Cultural "Hijos del estado de Michoacán," 1936), 7
61. Tony Morgan, "Proletarians, Politicos and Patriarchs: The Use and Abuse of Cultural Customs in the Early Industrialization of Mexico City, 1880-1910," in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebration and Popular Culture in Mexico, edited by William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French, 151-172 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 167
62. Pérez Bertruy Parques y jardines públicos, 335
63. Sakar, "Los Jardines," 132
64. Sakar, "Los Jardines," 135
65. Agostoni, Monuments of Progress, 47
66. Pérez Bertruy, "Parques y jardines públicos," 3
67. Pérez Bertruy, Parques y jardines públicos, Anexo 1
68. Manuel Perló Cohen, El paradigma Porfiriano: Historia del Desagüe del Valle de Mexico (Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Miguel Angel Porrua, 1999), 29
69. Perló Cohen, El paradigma Porfiriano, 31. Cohen also claims that the Junta Directiva, headed by Limantour, established a new administrative technique for the regime
70. "Las excursiones a las Obras del desagüe," El Universal, 17 February 1901
71. Also, Carolyn Merchant's, The Death of Nature:Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980) argues in part that a feminine view of the world, the idea that the earth constituted an organic whole, was replaced during the scientific revolution with the worldview that envisioned instead a masculine system of particles
72. The Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in Arizona was the United States first federal hydroelectric project, in 1906. It set into motion a century of engineering projects aimed at controlling water. See Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 45