Water
You know you’ve really made a friend in Mexico City when you ask to come over to their place to take a shower, because your water has gone out. It happens to everyone at some point here. Sometimes it’s a planned city- or neighborhood-wide shut off for repairs (that we hope are actually happening). Sometimes it’s a leak or another accident. Sometimes there’s simply not enough water for everyone and you get the short end of the stick with no warning or information about when it might end. We’re in the middle of the third kind of water shortage right now. My apartment complex is proactive about rationing what little is being delivered to our cistern, so we have water from roughly 5 to 8 a.m., 3 to 4 p.m., and 9 to 10 p.m.
I’ve had worse luck with water than many people I know, and far better luck than many more. I moved out of a previous building because it didn’t have a cistern and therefore no way to mitigate the vagaries of when and how much water would be coming through the city pipes. Toward the end of my time there, the insufficient tank we did have there didn’t fill up for weeks, and every morning we all lined up with our buckets at the spigot near the main door like we were going to the well. I cemented a lot of friendships with shower requests during that time, and I also learned how to bathe with a bucket and a yogurt container when I worried I was stretching people’s generosity. But of course, there are poor neighborhoods that haven’t had regular water for years. In those places a spigot near the door and nearby friends willing to gift you some of their running water would be incredible luxuries.
None of this is going to get better. Mexico City’s water situation has been both an incredible engineering marvel and an unsustainable environmental tragedy since the 17th century, when the still-new colonial government began draining the lakes that used to fill the geological basin in which the city sits. The Mexica had managed the water through incredible engineering marvels of their own for centuries before the conquest, but the Spanish never understood their methods or were particularly interested in doing so. (It didn’t help that much of Tenochtitlan’s water infrastructure was damaged during the conquest itself, so most of the colonists never personally saw it working.) The colonial government wanted to protect its citizens from dying in floods, and this was the era when European men of science started to believe they could and should bend nature to their will. They would get rid of the water by any means necessary, and they did. So here we are, 400 years later, trapped in the ongoing catastrophe that colonialism, science, and the burgeoning Enlightenment created for us. (After I have written a bestseller that frees me to sell any book I want, I will write Wolf Hall but about 17th-century water engineers in Mexico City.)
I often tell gringos that living in Mexico City feels like living in the future. I gather that in the U.S., most people like me live with a creeping sense of dread, waiting for the apocalyptic forces gathering on the horizon to finally rush in and irrevocably change the texture of their daily lives. In the meantime, however, they don’t really have to do anything differently except worry about it. The external landscape is changing, certainly, but the real drama is still mostly playing out in the internal landscape, as they try to come to grips with what they know but can’t quite believe will happen. (See: Weather, the new novel by Jenny Offill, which I tore through this week.) In Mexico City, on the other hand, those apocalypse forces are here and have been for a long time. They are already the framework in which all of us live. And although existing inequalities dramatically affect how we experience them, they are still more evenly distributed than they are in the U.S..
I certainly don’t like having my water rationed for weeks at a time. It’s annoying, it determines your whole schedule, and it crowds out the space for thinking about less urgent things. But coming from the U.S., I have always kind of admired how Mexico City’s environmental problems are impossible to deny or ignore on the most personal, practical level. When there’s a drought in California, you can only water your ostentatious lawn every other day, and everyone starts to feel guilty on, like, minute ten of their daily showers. The question always is, how can we convince people to conserve? How can we get them to believe that this is for real? When there’s not enough water for your neighborhood in Mexico City, you don’t get any, and that’s that. There is absolutely no question that this is for real. And it’s only getting worse.
Recommendations
If you’re interested in an in-depth look at Mexico City’s truly extraordinary water infrastructure and all its challenges, I recommend this article from the Guardian. And if you want to be terrified about how climate change exacerbates the city’s water problems, read this from the New York Times.