VIRTUOUS WATERS

Mineral Springs. Bathing,

and Infrastructure in Mexico

CASEY WALSH
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Virtuous Waters
 Virtuous Waters
Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico

Casey Walsh

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2018 by Casey Walsh

Suggested citation: Walsh, C. Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and

Infrastructure in Mexico. Oakland: ­University of ­California Press, 2018. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.48

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Walsh, Casey, author.

Title: Virtuous waters : mineral springs, bathing, and infrastructure in
Mexico / Casey Walsh.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054276| ISBN 9780520291737 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780520965393
(e-edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Mineral waters—Mexico—Mexico City. | Baths—Mexico—Mexico
City—History. | Groundwater—Mexico—Mexico City. | Water—Mexico—Mexico
City—History. | Water resources development—Mexico—Mexico City—21st
century. | Water-supply—Mexico—Mexico City—21st century.
Classification: LCC RM674 .W35 2018 | DDC 615.8/53—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054276
For Naomi, my little fish
 Table of C onte n ts

Illustrations ix
Preface xi
1 Waters/Cultures 1
2 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World 15
3 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City 34
4 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs 50
5 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence in the Late Nineteenth Century 67
6 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters 91
7 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution 118
8 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico 137
9 Virtuous Waters in the Twenty-First Century 155

Notes 163
Bibliography 181
Index 201
 Illustrati ons

MAP

1. Mexico, with locations of hot springs discussed in this book. xiv

F IG U R E S

1. Individual bathing room with placer, Peñón de los Baños, 2017. 2

2. An Aztec man taking a bath. Drawing from the Florentine Codex,
compiled by Bernardo de Sahagún, c.1540. 27
3. A temazcal. Drawing from the Codice Magliabechanio (sixteenth
century). 30
4. Alberca Pane. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883. 81
5. Baños. De Cuéllar 1889. 82
6. Baños de Chapultepec. Michaud 1874. 87
7. El Pozo “Pimentel,” La “Colonia de la Condesa.” El Mundo
Ilustrado 2, no. 12 (1906). 89
8. “Shower, Fleury Design.” Lugo 1875. 100
9. El Pocito, Villa de Guadalupe. Michaud 1874. 104
10. “Misting apparatus for pulverizing mineral waters in the inhalation
departments of the baths.” Lobato 1884. 106
11. Departamento de Baños, Peñón de los Baños bathhouse. El Mundo
Ilustrado 2, no. 12 (1906). 110
12. “Edificios de ‘El Peñón.’” El Mundo Ilustrado 2, no. 12 (1906). 111
13. “Salón de embotellado de las Aguas.” El Mundo Ilustrado 2, no. 12
(1906). 120
ix
x    Illustrations

14. “Empacadora—Aguilar Cacho.” Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría

de Salud, Mexico City. 123
15. Topo Chico bathhouse, c. 1890. DeGolyer Library, SMU, Dallas, Texas. 125
16. “Manantial Agua Caliente,” c. 1930. Archivo Histórico del Agua,
Mexico City. 130
17. “Manantial del Agua Caliente sobre la Margen Izquierda y dentro
del Cauce del Río de Tijuana,” c. 1920. Archivo Histórico del Agua,
Mexico City. 140
18. “El Bañito: Al Fondo el Campo de Aviación, Ixtapan de la Sal, Mex.”
Luis René Arizmendi, Ixtapan de la Sal, México. 143
19. “El Bañito: Una Pileta Circular.” Archivo Histórico del Agua,
Mexico City. 143
20. View of the Nueva Ixtapan, S.A. housing development, c. 1955.
Archivo Histórico del Agua, Mexico City. 151
21. Municipal bathhouse, Ixtapan de la Sal, c. 1965. Luis René
Arizmendi, Ixtapan de la Sal, Mexico. 152
22. A weekend afternoon in the Municipal Bathhouse, Ixtapan de la
Sal, 2009. Author. 156
23. Hydrotherapy room, Municipal Bathhouse, Ixtapan de la Sal, 2009.
Author. 157
24. El Pocito, Villa de Guadalupe, 2017. Author. 159
 Pre face

I spent my childhood summers in a swimming pool in my best friend’s backyard in

suburban Los Angeles. Usually it was just the two of us and we would spend hours
going down the slide, inventing new kinds of dives, or perfecting our splashing
techniques. After lunch and maybe a monster movie on TV, we would head back
for another few hours in the water. My family would also spend a week at beach
at the end of every summer, and my sister and I would dedicate much of that to
boogie boarding. I would fall asleep each night exhausted, feeling the swell of the
waves as if I were still floating in the ocean. Southern California is dry, and maybe
it was because the encounters I had with rivers and lakes were few and far between
that the cold, clear freshwaters of the mountains filled my body and mind with a
special kind of exuberant energy when I got a chance to swim in them. As I grew
older, backpacking trips to the mountains became more frequent, and I had my
first contacts with the strange, chthonic, social waters of hot springs. Throughout
my college years and during a brief career as an archaeologist I was outdoors a lot,
swimming and soaking when the opportunity arose. I learned to love water, and
associate it with fun, freedom, adventure, and the beauty of nature.
Graduate school in New York City was followed by a long period in Mexico
City, during which I conducted PhD research and then worked at the Universidad
Iberoamericana. The dissertation I wrote during that period, later a book, was
about the political economy and culture of irrigated cotton agriculture in northern
Mexico, which provided me with a different, more cerebral engagement with water.
The topic was fascinating, and I loved piecing the story together, but the water in
that research never felt like all those waters I felt earlier in my life: hot, cool, surg-
ing with the waves, salty, invigorating, quenching, sulfurous. The water I read and

xi
xii    Preface

wrote about wasn’t really felt at all. It was a resource measured in cubic meters and
liters per second; it belonged to cities, states, and nations and was the subject of
treaties; it formed political boundaries, was delivered to farmers, moved by capil-
lary action and evapotranspiration, was treated to comply with health standards.
After my daughters were born I began a slow return, something like a migra-
tory fish, to the waters I knew during my youth. I moved from Mexico City back
to Southern California, this time to UC Santa Barbara and its nearby beaches.
Watching the faces of my kids as I bathed them as infants, or as I held them
when they learned to swim in the pool and Jacuzzi at our apartment building, or
jumped around with them in the waves at the beach, revived those registers of the
human experience of water that I had forgotten, ironically, while I was becoming
an expert on the topic. The somewhat utopian project of raising children pushed
me toward less intellectual, more affective engagements with the environment
and with other people, and I found myself back in the waters, playing, splashing,
socializing. And thinking: How are these feelings and ideas about water shaped
socially, culturally, historically?
This book is about Mexico, a country I love, my other home. And without all the
people in Mexico the book would never have happened. I married Emiko Saldivar
in Tlayacapan, Morelos, and our girls, Amaya and Naomi, were born in Mexico
City. These three amazing women make me a better person, and give me all the
reasons I need to work for a better world. The support and love of my extended
family in Mexico has never wavered, and I gain strength from them all. I learned
from Michiko about onsen, ofuro, and the importance of the bath; Américo shared
with me a love of water that comes from growing up in a dry place. Aida Maria,
Laura, Claudia y Serguei, Atis y Dani, all the Tios, Tias, Primos y Primas: I hope
I haven’t bored you with my stories of hot springs. Great friends in Mexico City
always received me when I was turning pages in archives and libraries. Thanks
to Margarita, Claudio and Ibó, Roger and Cris, Adriana and Bensi, Jorge and
Catalina for the love and memories.
Colleagues have generously engaged me across all those institutional, intel-
lectual, linguistic, and cultural borders, never questioning too much how my
interest in the economic history of irrigated agriculture morphed into a project
about swimming and bathing. Special thanks to Mario Cerutti, Eva Rivas, Arturo
Carrillo, Cirila Quintero, Araceli Almaraz, and everyone else in the Asociación
de Historia Económica del Norte de México, for all the intellectual engagements,
comments on papers, and camaraderie over the years. And to Luis Aboites, a
special thanks for providing detailed comments, yet again, on a manuscript that
shrinks before the example of his scholarship. My deepest intellectual debts and
bonds are with these colleagues, and I hope that with this book I have added some-
thing worthwhile to their excellent research.
Various institutions supported the archival and field research presented in these
pages. The University of California, Santa Barbara provided travel and research
 Preface    xiii

funds through the Dean’s office of the Division of Social Sciences and the Academic
Senate. The Universidad Iberoamericana generously funded a semester of sabbatical
residency, and provided access to the library and archive. A number of institutions
invited me to present pieces of this book: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte; El Centro
de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social; El Instituto
Tecnológico de Monterrey; La Universidad Autónoma de Baja California; La
Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa; La Universidad de Extramadura; the Lancaster
Environment Center of Lancaster University; the University of California, Merced;
the University of Luxemburg. I thank you all deeply.
Lastly, I would like to express my deep appreciation to all those who work
toward the goal of free and open intellectual production and publication for the
benefit of humanity. The University of California is a public institution working
for the people of California, and many here at UC take this mission very seriously.
I particularly wish to thank the excellent editors at the University of California
Press who have dedicated their time and energy to developing the Luminos Open
Access Series, which offers knowledge freely to a public that transcends paywalls
and border walls. The external manuscript reviewers and the editorial committee
of the UC Press gave their time and energy to shaping the book, and the University
Library and the Academic Senate at UC Santa Barbara provided the subvention
that pushed this book into the realm of the creative commons. It has been my great
pleasure to work with you all.
 Aguacaliente
Tijuana

Rio

Br
avo
N

Topo Chico
Monterrey
GULF OF

Durango MEXICO

Aguascalientes
PACIFIC Tepic
Tuxpan
OCEAN San Bartolome
Guadalajara
Cuincho
Mexico City Peñon de los Baños
El Jorullo Puebla
Ixtapan de la Sal Tehuacán
Springs Oaxtepec Axocapan

0 100 200 300 Miles

0 500 Kilometers

map 1. Mexico, with locations of hot springs discussed in this book.

 1

Waters/Cultures

There were a few pages about Peñón de los Baños on the internet, and my guide-
book also briefly mentioned it. I had thought it would be more important, con-
sidering the presence of Peñón in the historical documents I was collecting in
the archives downtown. Real hot springs in the middle of Mexico City—nature
was difficult to locate amidst the densest of urban conglomerations. And because
the shower seemed to have displaced the bathtub in my rented apartment, I was
in dire need of a good soak. The bathhouse was located on Circuito Interior, the
city’s main circumferential artery, on a hill next to the airport, and occupied the
lower floor of a nondescript U-shaped brick and concrete apartment building. In
the courtyard garden of the building, however, a seventeenth-century chapel gave
mute testimony to the powerful spiritual connections with these waters that once
bubbled up from the earth on their own when this extinct volcanic hill was still an
island in the lake that covered the Valley of Mexico.
As I looked around the place, I strained for glimpses of the uses, meanings, and
practices sedimented in this site over time. In the foyer of the building a man ped-
dling a spiritual cure invited me for a free diagnostic; there were flyers posted for
energy alignment and a “course on miracles,” as well as more common therapeutic
treatments such as massage. Sitting in the drab hallway with a number of elderly
patients and their attendants, I drank a few swallows of mineral water from a dis-
posable paper cone and perused the old maps and photographs on the walls that
testified to the prominence the place had once enjoyed as a sumptuous bathhouse
and the site of bottling plants beginning in the 1880s, and then its renovation as a
public health facility in the 1950s.

1
2    chapter 1

Figure 1. Individual bathing room with placer, Peñón de los Baños, 2017. Photograph by
Author.

I was escorted into my own bath cubicle by a young woman in hospital scrubs
and high, white rubber boots, and given precise instructions: soak for a maximum
of twenty minutes; repose sweating on the cot wrapped in a sheet; do not drink
more than three cups of water. The constant deep rumble of trucks and cars from
the highway outside the window greeted me in the bathing room, where a tub
of chipped, stained marble slabs—what was called a placer in Mexico for hun-
dreds of years—filled quickly with steaming mineral water pumped from eighty
meters below the building, a water that had been used for bathing in that locale for
the last five hundred years. The sink did not work; the sheet covering the flimsy
chromed cot with torn vinyl cushions was bleachy-clean but bedraggled. None of
that mattered too much, because like the other clients of Peñón I was not looking
for a luxury spa pampering. It was all about the water: soft and hot, relaxing and
curative. A moment of natural healing in one of the world’s biggest, densest cities.

HO T SP R I N G S A N D BAT H I N G : EV E RY DAY WAT E R

C U LT U R E S

The visit to Peñón’s mineral springs in Mexico City was one of dozens I have made
over the years in different places around the world. I of course am not alone: many
people seek out mineral waters for their therapeutic properties, their flavor, their
enjoyable warmth, and the good times they have drinking or soaking in them
with friends and family. What began in college in the late 1980s as an encoun-
ter with the peculiar splendor of these strange corners of the landscape became
twenty years later an anthropological research project to understand how and
 Waters/Cultures    3

why people use these peculiar groundwaters in Mexico; how they imbue them
with such intense and complex meanings; and how they understand their quo-
tidian interactions with them, bathing and drinking. How is this most direct of
­experiences—­drinking or soaking in water—a social and cultural construction?
Who owns the mineral waters, and who is allowed access to them? What do the
waters do to us? Why have scholars not embraced the topics of hot springs and
bathing, when water is such a fashionable topic?
In this book I approach these as historical, anthropological questions, asking
how interactions with mineral waters in Mexico took shape over the long modern
period from around 1500 to the present. Most of what we know about the history
of hot springs and bathing comes from Europe, and Mexico was conquered and
colonized by Europeans, and so it is reasonable to start this inquiry there. While
there is relatively little academic interest in mineral springs today, for millennia
the study of their waters guided inquiry in Europe about the relation of humans to
nature. Waters were thought of as multiple, unique liquids, much in the way that
today we think of different bottles of wine as unique yet belonging to a unified
category. Both everyday people and scientists also considered them ­efficacious—
waters were agents that acted upon the world and, in particular, on the bodies of
humans. The Romans are the most important influence in this quest to understand
human-water relations; following the ideas of Greeks they formulated key elements
of a medicine of waters that has lasted to the present day.1 As they expanded their
empire they built bathhouses on hot springs and incorporated local religious tradi-
tions into Roman bathing culture. Baths were ubiquitous in the Roman period, and
still important throughout northern Europe during early Christiandom. During
the years from about 500 to 1000 bathing became less frequent and took on new
forms, but mineral springs retained their strong significance for healing, often in
the form of holy water.2
After 400 ad, Roman infrastructure fell into disuse and Roman water culture
fell into disrepute, but Mediterranean Arabs carried forth those ideas and physi-
cal engagements with water during the medieval period. Between the tenth and
twelfth centuries much of the classical knowledge about bathing and health was
translated and conserved by scholars in the western Caliphate in Cordova (now
Spain), from where it spread to Italy and France.3 For example, Peter of Eboli’s
narrative poem from the 1220s, about the thermal baths at Pozzuoli in southern
central Italy, offers an extended discussion of mineral waters using classical refer-
ences. The poem is testimony to a deeply ingrained popular culture of bathing
with prominent sociality and sexuality that may have receded slightly between 500
and 1000, but was once again flourishing in the 1200s.4 In Spain and other areas
of the Arab world bathing in bathhouses continued to be a daily event for many
people in the Middle Ages, and although the steam bath replaced the immersion
pool as the principal practice, the waters retained their spiritual agency. In the
1500s, the ascendancy of Christians in Spain led to a century-long hiatus in which
4    chapter 1

bathing was largely abandoned. In general, however, between 500 and 1500, people
continued to take to the waters, giving lie to commonly held ideas of a dismal,
dirty, and depressed medieval Europe.
As the elite renaissance of bathing expanded in France and other northern
European countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new users with
new knowledge about the specificity and agency of waters butted up against exist-
ing ones. Scholars reread the works of Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Hippocrates,
Galen, and others who discussed the therapeutic benefits of bathing and drinking,
especially in hot and mineral waters, and bathhouses were rebuilt using classical
architectural plans.5 Part of the impetus behind the reemergence of therapeutic
bathing literature was to control the stream of people taking the waters, and shift
the basis of popular healing practices from empirical “trial and error” toward dis-
ciplined reason in the hands of doctors.6 Differences in hot springs water cultures
were delineated by fundamental social divides, such as bourgeoisie/nobility and
peasant/elite, but Renaissance science incorporated elements of late medieval pop-
ular culture that derived, albeit remotely, from the practices and knowledge of the
Greeks, Romans, and later Arabs.7 Beginning in the 1600s, immersion and steam
bathing were recast as secular practices increasingly explained as therapeutic and,
later, hygienic. Bathing and the use of heterogeneous waters grew dramatically
in the second half of the nineteenth century, hand in hand with the extension of
urban infrastructures and new structures of feeling about nudity, odors, cleanli-
ness, and the availability of water.8
Curative and hygienic practices evolved that included bathing, showering,
drinking, and even inhaling mineral waters, and each of these took many forms.
Bathing by immersion was for a long time the principal form of contact with
waters, and different kinds of bathtubs and pools were designed for different kinds
of baths: the full-body bathtub, the smaller tub for the sitting bath, and even tubs
for the isolated treatment of limbs. Each particular mineral spring was thought to
have powers that derived from the specific qualities of its waters, and people sought
treatment of their ailments by choosing among those springs, and from among the
doctors who set up practices at each. The conceptual framework for understand-
ing these waters and treatments evolved as well, as emergent scientific disciplines
provided new information about the character of the different waters. Modern
chemistry and medicine, for example, were pioneered in the spas of Europe as
part of a search for the causes of mineral-water cures.9 Even today, the labels of
mineral-water bottles often provide analyses of the chemical contents of the waters
they contain, and spas with mineral waters prominently display this information.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Pasteur and the advent of microbiology
shifted attention to the organisms living in water, and the effects of ingesting them.
At that time drinking also became a principal focus for the prevention of disease
and for curing ailments with mineral waters, as it was increasingly believed that
the minerals in water were not absorbed through the skin, and therefore needed
 Waters/Cultures    5

to be introduced through the stomach. The inhalation of mineral waters in the

form of steam or mist also gained prominence in the late nineteenth century, while
curative and prophylactic bathing focused on the physical application of streams
of water to the body—showers, jets—which were also considered important for
cleansing the skin of microbiological vectors of disease, and on the effects of the
temperature of waters on the body. Physical contact with waters changed as medi-
cine, science, and technology evolved.
The modern reshaping of water cultures gained momentum with the growth
of capitalism and a reworking of human-environment relations in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The modern spa was born in that period, linked to the
formation of a bourgeoisie who engaged in leisure activities previously restricted
to the nobility.10 Historians connect European spas to the professionalization of
the medical industry and its relation to state power, a process that formed part of
the wider reconstruction of human relationships to water involved in public health
and the sanitary city.11 Increasingly, mineral and hot springs were destinations for
middle-class urbanites seeking relaxation and therapy, and this movement consti-
tuted a budding tourism industry.12 These particular social uses of mineral springs
spread to other places in the world through the assemblages of empire, especially
in the nineteenth century. Mineral springs were important sites of recuperation for
French colonial administrators, for example, and hot springs bathing became an
important activity in Brazil in the nineteenth century.13 The British and Hapsburg
empires created global networks of spas that served colonists and tourists, and the
influence of Japanese bathing traditions is seen in Europe after 1860.14 The business
of bathing and bottling drove the reshaping of cultural engagements with waters.
Water cultures were formed not only in hot springs, of course. Ordinary
Europeans bathed in rivers and lakes, especially where it was warm. Parisians with
some money bathed at swimming clubs in the Seine as early as the thirteenth cen-
tury, and people heated water to wash themselves.15 Wealthy people took baths at
home in the Middle Ages, and these, like the public bathhouses in areas under
Arab influence, utilized regular water heated for the purpose. Seaside resorts also
became fashionable destinations in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and experts produced theories about the therapeutic effects of bathing in these
other waters, as well as elaborate “bathing machines” that lowered the delicate and
infirm into the beneficial liquid.16 Of course, many people just swam in whatever
waters were nearby, for fun or to cool off.17
The popularity of bathing in public bathhouses culminated in the late nine-
teenth century. After that, the growth of urban hydraulic infrastructure moved
the bath into the domestic setting, ending the era of the public bathhouse in
many of the cities of Europe and North America by the early twentieth century.
Simultaneously, advances in bacteriology called into question theories about
the curative properties of water, and pushed medicine away from water. After
the famous discovery by J. T. Snow that London’s cholera epidemics were linked
6    chapter 1

to water, the liquid was increasingly seen as a health risk rather than a benefit.
Bottled spring water was favored by those who could afford it, but by 1900 the
cities in the developed world built infrastructures and established water qual-
ity standards that assured clean, safe tap water for large urban populations.18 In
places where public water infrastructures were slower in coming or incomplete,
or where deeper cultures of social bathing reigned, such as Eastern Europe and
Japan, public bathhouses lasted deeper into the twentieth century.19 Hot springs
resorts fell out of style in many places in Europe and North America after 1920,
while remaining popular among the middle classes in Spain and Eastern Europe,
where national health care systems supported the water cure through the mid-
twentieth century. The restructuring of economies around the world in the last
decades of the twentieth century has changed our relationship to mineral waters
once again. The neoliberal downsizing of public health systems created an oppor-
tunity for capital to refashion many of the spas in Europe as luxury establishments
for a smaller, wealthier clientele.20

WAT E R S T U D I E S : HOM O G E N E I T Y A N D
HETEROGENEIT Y

Considering the long history of mineral springs, and their importance to the
bottling industry today, it seems strange that most contemporary water scholars
ignore them and focus instead on the infrastructure and social organization of
systems that use surface waters. Anthropologists, in particular, have written a lot
about public water systems, but very little about mineral waters and bathing. Why
is this? It is true that hot springs and mineral springs are quite rare compared to
other sources of water, and produce a very small volume of water. Despite this,
hot springs are very notable features of the landscape and have been the object
of intensive use and cultural activity for thousands of years. They also have held
the attention of scholars and scientists from the Roman period until well into the
twentieth century.21 In fact, mineral waters seem to have fallen from scholarly view
only recently.
A more likely reason than their rarity for the neglect of mineral waters in
research today is that they do not fit easily into modern narratives of water as a
single, uniform, inert element that can be managed by a unified infrastructure.
Christopher Hamlin and Jamie Linton have argued that for most of history waters
were understood as heterogeneous, with distinct origins, properties, and pow-
ers.22 This shifted in the eighteenth century, when the prevalent idea of waters as
multiple gave way to the idea that water is a single, essential element: Lavoisier’s
formulation of all waters as H2O. It was a movement of thought in which chemists,
biologists, and sanitarians identified both the uniformity of water and a seem-
ingly infinite variety of dissolved and microscopic contents that made each water
distinct. In the emerging science of water, the liquid was a homogeneous element
 Waters/Cultures    7

and the obvious qualitative differences among waters that so long occupied the
attention of healers, city planners, farmers, and everybody else were now attrib-
uted to the “impurities” carried by those waters: sodium, iron, sulfur, carbonates,
microorganisms, etc. In this cultural shift, heterogeneous waters began to share
space, in an uneasy balance, with a unified water.
This paradoxical balance enabled diverse hydrosocial processes to unfold. The
conceptual unification of waters into water was accompanied by the develop-
ment of a new “arithmetic” style of reasoning that facilitated the management of
large quantities of the liquid through extensive physical infrastructures. While the
impressive hydraulic works of Rome, for example, certainly required sophisticated
engineering to move large volumes of liquid, they were built to preserve the plu-
ral identities and agencies of the various waters that the city drew from different
sources.23 However, the conceptual shift from waters to water that began in the
eighteenth century implied that an infinite number of sources could be brought
together by a physical infrastructure extending limitlessly through Cartesian
space. In this vision a singular water was subject to a single standard of quality
that set acceptable amounts of different biological and chemical impurities such as
bacteria, arsenic, and so on. The culmination of this process was the monumen-
tal integration of waters and waterways in the western United States after World
War II, and the plans for even grander, transcontinental hydraulic works: a fully
plumbed landscape.24 As modern hydraulic infrastructures expanded, an ever-
smaller proportion of people got their waters directly from wells, rivers, and the
like, and more saw the tap or the irrigation canal as the source of water. That social,
conceptual, and infrastructural shift to “water” obscured many of our uses of and
knowledge about heterogeneous “waters” such as mineral springs.

H Y D R AU L IC S O C I E T Y, I R R IG AT IO N C OM M U N I T I E S ,
WAT E R C U LT U R E S

The literature on water that developed in the twentieth century, including much of
the historical and anthropological work on the topic today, reflects this intellectual
and infrastructural domination of “waters” by “water.” Rather than devote energy
to understanding particular waters and how they shape diverse human ecologies,
scholarship on water in the twentieth century usually treated water as an inert,
universal backdrop to the question of how humans organize themselves socially
and politically to utilize the substance. These water studies can claim one origin in
the work by V. Gordon Childe and Karl Wittfogel that theorized the connection
between the rise of complex societies and state power and the physical and politi-
cal control over water. Anthropologists Julian Steward and Angel Palerm incorpo-
rated Wittfogel’s ideas into the “cultural ecology” perspective in anthropology that
they developed in the United States and Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s.25 Scholars
working in this tradition centered attention on the control of water to produce
8    chapter 1

agricultural surpluses, the constitution of peasant and political classes, and the
transfer of surplus from the former to the latter.26 For decades since, debates have
wheeled around the central pivot of irrigated agriculture and the state, and histo-
ries of water that focus on the modern period in both capitalist and socialist sys-
tems reproduce the same assumptions about water as an undifferentiated and inert
backdrop.27 In all this work the water itself is assumed to be a homogeneous sub-
stance across diverse geographies and cultures, incapable of influencing people’s
bodies, their activities, or their ideas about the environment.
The critique of how irrigation served to consolidate the power of state and capi-
tal compelled many anthropologists studying water to turn their attention from
“hydraulic society” to small-scale irrigation systems managed by peasant commu-
nities.28 These scholars questioned a central assumption of the “hydraulic society”
literature by pointing out that irrigation does not necessarily lead to despotism
or state formation, but is often at the heart of the reproduction of community
and peasant domestic economy.29 Aspects of culture such as authority and reli-
gion were recognized as playing a key role in water management. But despite the
critical angle taken by the “irrigation community” literature on the high modern-
ist pretensions and failures of large-scale irrigation, it shared with the work on
“hydraulic society” a common understanding of water as a uniform substance to
be managed, and it privileged questions of social organization and technology. The
differences among systems were found in the structure and scale of water manage-
ment, more than the cultural understandings of the water itself, or the plethora
of uses people make of waters in their daily lives other than irrigating fields and
managing hydraulic infrastructure. The unitary, arithmetic notion of water as a
singular, exchangeable substance persisted, carried forward in the culture of schol-
ars and politicians who, despite the differences in their political projects, shared an
ontological blindness to the heterogeneity and efficacy of waters.
Despite the rise of homogeneous water among scholars and planners, the het-
erogeneity of waters and water cultures never disappeared, and actually gained
strength through the business of bathing and bottling. Even today people discern
the particular characteristics of waters in different public water systems: New York
has famously good tap water, Florida not so much. But it was mineral waters that
retained their identities most strongly. During the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, while other waters were physically integrated into infrastructural systems,
mineral waters were left to themselves and their ancestral uses. Their dissolved
minerals often render them harmful to agriculture fields, industrial machinery,
and urban pipes, and so these heterogeneous waters continued to be used for bath-
ing and drinking, activities that expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, reaching a peak around 1900 before fading in the 1920s. Hot springs
spas flourished all over Europe, the United States, the French and English colo-
nies, and, as we shall see, Mexico. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth
 Waters/Cultures    9

centuries, mineral waters and other watery drinks became a major industry, and
today the business of bottling heterogeneous waters is expanding once again.30
The recent proliferation of heterogeneous watery use-values takes place in the
context of a global “water crisis” defined by serious contamination problems and
an absolute scarcity of the resource brought on by waste and hard limits to the
amount of fresh water that can be captured and stored with infrastructures we have
built over the last century. Water managers in the United States realize that the con-
struction of yet more massive, elaborate, and energy-intensive hydraulic systems is
not a sustainable solution.31 The World Bank and other national governments have
followed suit in seeking less costly infrastructural solutions to providing water for
irrigation and urban use, and placing more emphasis on decentralized organiza-
tional and political solutions to reducing overall consumption of the liquid.32 This
turn to decentralized demand management has brought with it a recentralization
of water management in the realm of culture.33 But the concept of “culture” at work
here is often narrow and instrumental: shared economic and environmental values
for the liquid to be distributed from the top down. Where possible, demand man-
agement programs start by setting prices for water that will lower consumption.
Usually these are tiered pricing schemes in which a basic quantity of the liquid is
assured at low or no cost, and greater amounts can be purchased at increasingly
higher unit rates. The assumption behind these schemes is that high prices serve as
signals for consumers to reduce their consumption. “Culture,” from this perspec-
tive, is a unified system of values, shared within a group, that guide the universal,
economic decision-making of rational individuals.
Decentralization and demand management in the neoliberal moment have also
been initiated from below as popular processes, and these movements are rooted
in deep cultural histories and local meanings for waters and landscapes. For exam-
ple, the “New Water Culture” (Nueva Cultura del Agua) movement in Spain came
together in the 1990s to recover, foster, and create environmental ethics and par-
ticipatory management.34 Activists and scholars argued that irreplaceable elements
of their environment, society, and culture were threatened by the government’s
1992 National Hydraulic Plan, and they spearheaded an effort to chronicle and
valorize the multiple uses, values, and meanings of the water.35 Another example
of how sensitivity to local meanings and waters is being propelled by local action
comes from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation, in what is today the U.S.
states of North and South Dakota. Thousands of people from all walks of life have
joined the struggle of the Lakota Sioux to defend their lands, their waters, and
themselves from contamination and dispossession by oil companies and their gov-
ernment allies. A key phrase in this mobilization is “water is life,” which expresses
an unyielding respect and love for the planet and its beings that is at odds with a
way of life built on extraction. The politics of water has clearly moved onto the
terrain of culture.
10    chapter 1

T H E P O L I T IC A L E C O L O G Y O F WAT E R S : N EW
M AT E R IA L I SM S , O L D O N T O L O G I E S

Scholars are contributing to this upsurge in interest in water cultures in at least two
ways. On the one hand, they are producing studies on a number of important top-
ics, including the varied and complex meanings for water,36 practices of swimming
and bathing,37 long-standing uses and meanings of mineral springs,38 the current
boom in bottled waters,39 and role of science in shaping our interactions with the
liquid.40 Along with these new topics of study, scholars are exploring new ways of
theorizing and depicting the relations humans have with the world that surrounds
them. The modernist assumption of the centrality of human will, intentionality,
and action has been roundly questioned, and a whole array of animate and inani-
mate nonhuman agents are now contemplated as participants in “assemblages” or
systems that make history and act politically.41
The foundations for this scholarly perspective of “new materialism” are often
found in Spinoza, Deleuze, and other philosophers, but in this book I suggest that
nondualist ontologies of material vitality and efficacy permeate popular culture,
and can be identified in the history of mineral waters and bathing. For thousands
of years people have ingested and immersed themselves in mineral springs because
they believe these waters have a beneficial effect on their bodies and souls. These
waters are still considered to be efficacious, as evidenced by the immense market for
bottled mineral waters and mineral water–based cosmetics. This is not simply the
idea that pure waters do no harm and dirty waters are bad for you, but rather that
mineral waters are “virtuous”—that they are powerful agents that act beneficially
and therapeutically on the human organism to increase well-being. Drinking and
bathing in mineral waters are activities motivated by a popular ontology not entirely
commensurable with that which holds the individual human self to be sovereign.
To understand the long history of this popular ontology of waters this book
takes a political ecology approach to the social relations and cultures of mineral
waters, bathing, and infrastructures. Political ecology infuses a materialist focus
on human-environment dynamics, social organization, and power with a critique
of the conceptual categories that structure socioenvironmental inequality and
destruction.42 Political ecology thus urges us to consider how a modern ontol-
ogy of water came to dominate other ways of understanding waters as a material,
social process. The book shows how conceptual dimensions of the waters/water
dynamic are connected to the expansion of hydraulic infrastructures, the inte-
grated of waters and people into coordinated hydrosocial systems, the displace-
ment of some forms of bathing by others, the inclusion of heterogeneous waters in
commodity exchange, and the role of the mineral waters themselves in shaping all
of this. But political ecology also helps us to recognize that this historical process
of domination is neither unilineal nor complete, and that alternate concepts and
uses of waters continue to exist together with the groups that nurture them.43
 Waters/Cultures    11

C HA P T E R S A N D A R G UM E N T S

In 1500 Iberoamerican water cultures were marked by deep conflict. In chapter 2

I use secondary literature and firsthand accounts of soldiers and priests to dis-
cuss how, at the close of the Reconquista, ascendant Christians in Spain attacked
Jewish and Arab institutions and practices of bathing, especially the hammam,
or steambath, driving the bath out of sight in the sixteenth century. Conquering
Spaniards in what is today central and southern Mexico brought this deep hostil-
ity toward bathing to bear on the indigenous steambath, or temazcal, which was
the principal mode of bathing in the Americas and an important site for social,
therapeutic, sexual, and religious activities. Bathing in water recovered its accept-
ability by 1600, although Spanish missionaries and government officials continued
the effort to extirpate indigenous cultural practices from the temazcal and reduce
its multiple functions to only the cleansing of bodies. By 1700 the temazcal was
widely accepted among American-born Spaniards, and many indigenous people
and humble mestizos also periodically immersed themselves in hot water bathtubs
(placeres) offered by the bathhouses in Mexico City. During this period the first
evidence appears that Mexican hot springs were developed into baths by religious
orders to treat diseases and ailments, part of a burgeoning transatlantic field of
medicine that carried with it the revaluation of hot and mineral spring-waters.
Records of popular bathing for health and pleasure in the hot springs of Peñón de
los Baños and Michoacán also appear at this time, showing that this was a cultural
shift that worked its way throughout society. This chapter discusses the intersec-
tions of class and race that shaped bathing and the social use of hot springs in colo-
nial Mexico, and shows how these cultures of water were shaped by hierarchical
fields of power, notions of bodily difference, and inequality in access and property.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on bath practices and water science in the Enlightenment.
The late eighteenth century is a particularly important moment in which notions
of cleanliness, public health, and urban order came together in the reorganization
and regulation of Mexico City’s water system and the practices and meanings of
bathing. Chapter 3 shows how ideas of rational government were deployed to deal
with problems of water scarcity and social effervescence. Investments in infra-
structure brought together multiple waters, and the material and conceptual unifi-
cation of waters as a singular substance began to take shape unevenly. Mexico City
suffered from a scarcity of freshwater, and so the viceroy Conde de Revillagigedo
launched a campaign to extend and improve the hydraulic infrastructure. These
material developments were accompanied by a moral effort to reshape popular
bathing practices that were deemed dangerous to boundaries of race, class, and
sex, and the social order those boundaries defined. Archival documents from the
Departments of Water and Police of the Mexico City government attest to efforts
by the ruling class to circumscribe popular bathing practices and discipline unruly
subjects. Much of this was aimed at keeping people and waters in the right place:
12    chapter 1

local officials intervened to stop people from bathing themselves and their animals
in the public fountains, to keep men and women apart in the bathhouses, and to
keep wastewater separate from freshwater. The arts of government were enacted
in the spaces of the bath and on the bodies of bathers in a quest to form modern
moral and political subjects.
The late eighteenth century also witnessed the emergence of science, and
Mexican mineral waters were a principal object of study for chemists, pharma-
cists, and doctors. In chapter 4 I discuss how mineral springs medicine flour-
ished during a time marked by intellectual and cultural opening and, eventually,
the dismantling of the Spanish colonial government in the Americas. Studies of
various Mexican hot springs were carried out under Royal orders in Michoacán,
Tehuacán, and the Valley of Mexico, and the church conducted other studies. It
was during the rule of the Bourbon government that the bathhouse at Peñón de los
Baños was rebuilt, a sign of the prosperity generated by increased trade as well as
technological advances in mining and industry. Growing wealth and the upwelling
of scientific ideas about the efficacy of waters only partially displaced, however,
everyday practices of bathing and access to these waters by the poor.
Chapter 5 shows how, in the second half of the nineteenth century, improved
drilling and pumping technology integrated subterranean aquifers into urban
water infrastructure, providing an unprecedented opulence of water. New sources
of groundwater facilitated the creation of many new public bathing facilities in
Mexico City and a related reduction of the flow of springs that served local com-
munities in the Valley of Mexico for thousands of years. Swimming pools and
bathhouses opened in the new, wealthy neighborhoods near Chapultepec Park
and along Paseo de la Reforma, marking an explosion of social bathing. A period
of exaggerated economic growth between 1890 and 1910 supported a dramatic
expansion of the urban water system, the building of household bathrooms, and
the practice of individual private bathing. This marked the beginning of a long,
and never fully consummated, shift from public bathing to private bathing.
Chapter 6 shows how this changing sociality of bathing in the nineteenth
­century was accompanied by advances in chemistry, microbiology, and medicine.
Journal articles from the mid-1800s tell us about the project to scientifically char-
acterize the diversity of the waters used for bathing and drinking in Mexico. These
documents reveal how microbiology defined established practices of bathing and
drinking as potentially dangerous for public health, and set new parameters for
the healthful interaction with water. Biological approaches did not displace chem-
istry from its position of authority in the realm of public health; in fact, belief
in the therapeutic virtues of mineral waters only increased. Businesses of min-
eral water treatments—bathing and drinking—were established in Peñón de los
Baños, Guadalupe, Topo Chico, Aguascalientes, Tehuacán, and elsewhere, and
these businesses reinforced concepts of heterogeneous waters and alternate bath-
ing practices.
 Waters/Cultures    13

The development of businesses at mineral springs did not occur in a vacuum.

In chapter 7 I evaluate the role of the Mexican state in promoting the transfer of
control over mineral springs from communities of peasants to urban industrial
businessmen. The incursion of capital into Mexico during the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries led to the renovation of bathing facilities after almost a century
of neglect, the creation of mineral water bottling plants, and the privatization of
mineral and hot springs. In Tehuacán the state facilitated the consolidation of the
bottling industry by imposing public health regulations that eliminated small and
artisanal companies. State regulations insisted on a homogeneous standard of bio-
logical quality that enabled bottlers to increase their production of heterogeneous
mineral waters and soft drinks. In Topo Chico, state lawyers and scientists helped
to wrest control of the waters from peasants, who for centuries relied on them
for agricultural and domestic uses, and place them in those of industrial bottlers
including the Coca-Cola Company.
In chapter 8 I argue that the ongoing heterogeneity of water cultures is rooted
in social heterogeneity. The pressure on hot springs generated by capital expansion
into Mexico between roughly 1880 and 1930 met with strong resistance by rural,
small-town Mexicans who fought to maintain their waters as common property
with open access. After the revolution, national elites inspired by the model of
tourist development put into practice at the Agua Caliente hot springs in Baja
California and in Tehuacán collaborated with local actors in an effort to turn the
town of Ixtapan de la Sal, in Mexico State, into a destination for bourgeois tourists
from Mexico City. However, residents of that town challenged the new monopoly
by outsiders over the hot springs they had always used, and charted an alternative
plan for community ownership and management of those waters that preserved
access to them for locals and humble visitors. I argue that this struggle and oth-
ers over Mexico’s mineral springs were brought on by competing cultural projects
defined in terms of race, class, ethnicity. and locality.
I conclude on a positive note. There often seems to be little hope for restoring a
respectful relationship with the waters in our world. The construction of massive
infrastructure proceeds apace, and groundwater in all parts of the world is rapidly
being depleted. Visit most households in most cities and the unification of water
appears to have gotten the upper hand: people are hard pressed to identify their
water, its qualities and origins, and most have just as little understanding of the
infrastructures that serve to connect them to the world and each other. Sit a while
in a hot mineral spring, however, and the people you meet will explain the par-
ticular qualities and therapeutic uses for that spring, and compare them with those
of other springs: some salty; some sulfurous; some metallic. The springwaters you
soak in will leave your skin feeling and smelling a certain way, which may compel
you to consider how those particular waters act upon your body.
This book concludes that such experiences are vitally important to any proj-
ect of reconstructing our relation to water, and that our daily interactions with
14    chapter 1

water—bathing and drinking in particular—are potential sites for this reconstruc-

tion. Most efforts to deal with problems of scarcity and pollution of water try to
increase supply or decrease demand through modern universalizing approaches
such as monumental infrastructures or water markets. These approaches have
not worked so far, and the book suggests that they may be part of the problem
rather than the solution. Our modern water cultures are relatively recent devel-
opments, and even today not all aspects of our water cultures are alienated and
homogenized; they never fully will be. Water cultures are products of long mate-
rial and meaningful histories that we can trace back hundreds or, in some cases,
thousands of years. And while the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of
modern water may push us toward integration, uniformity and exchangeability at
ever-greater scales, they never fail to reproduce heterogeneity. The wealth of varied
practices, ideas, and values that make up this heterogeneity may help us to move
our relationship with water in a more sustainable, less damaging direction.

A N O T E O N T H E T E X T A N D M E T HO D S O F
H I S T O R IC A L A N T H R O P O L O G Y

This book uses techniques from history and anthropology to tell a long story about
waters and people. It deploys mostly archival and documentary evidence to locate
the origins and describe the evolution of our relationship with waters in Mexico.
In this sense it is cultural and social history. However, I spent days, weeks. and
months at hot springs in Mexico, bathing and socializing, taking interviews and
notes, and drawing site maps. That fieldwork is not visible in the text, but it frames
the historical research, and defines many of the questions I hope to have answered
in the book. What may be more apparent is the ethnographic approach I take to
the archival and documentary evidence, always looking for the quotidian experi-
ences and cultural understandings of people who drank and bathed in the past. I
reproduce, verbatim, the words and testimony of participants in this history, and
set these passages apart in boxes, in quotation marks. In other places I reconstruct
what I imagine was happening from the perspective of those participants. These
reconstructed passages are also set apart in boxes, but have no quotation marks, as
they are, finally, my own words.
 2

Bathing and Domination in the Early

Modern Atlantic World

“From this place we could likewise see the three causeways which led into
Mexico—that from Iztapalapan, by which we had entered the city four days ago;
that from Tlacupa, along which we took our flight eight months after, when we
were beaten out of the city by the new monarch Cuitlahuatzin; the third was that
of Tepeaquilla. We also observed the aqueduct which ran from Chapultepec, and
provided the whole town with sweet water. We could also distinctly see the bridges
across the openings, by which these causeways were intersected, and through
which the waters of the lake ebbed and flowed. The lake itself was crowded with
canoes, which were bringing provisions, manufactures, and other merchandise to
the city. From here we also discovered that the only communication of the houses
in this city, and of all the other towns built in the lake, was by means of draw-
bridges or canoes. In all these towns the beautiful white plastered temples rose
above the smaller ones, like so many towers and castles in our Spanish towns, and
this, it may be imagined, was a splendid sight.”
—Bernal Díaz del Castillo

Source: Díaz del Castillo [1568] 1844.

The Spaniards were astonished. The city they entered was clean and orderly, with
enormous bustling markets, wide streets and plazas, huge pyramids, and other
impressive feats of engineering. In some ways their descriptions recalled the early
modern Iberian cities they knew, with white-plastered monumental architecture,
peasants and nobles, and thriving regional economies. Unsettling the comparisons
15
16    chapter 2

at a fundamental level, however, was the fact that Tenochtitlán was an aquatic city,
built to float at the edge of land and water, different from those of the semi-arid
landscapes back home. Díaz del Castillo’s perspective on this city in the lake was
gained from the top of the Templo Mayor—the main ceremonial pyramid—on
November 12, 1519, and was recounted in Spain in 1568, a lifetime after the Spaniards
conquered the Mexica rulers and subjected the people. Much of the wonder of the
experience had faded by the time of the retelling, and what remained was a stra-
tegic, military perspective that identified the important points of control over the
watery milieu: drawbridges, aqueducts, and causeways. In the twenty-one months
that followed the visit to Moctezuma’s palace, these crucial infrastructures were
destroyed by the Spanish and their allies. The domination of the lacustrine capital
of the Mexica empire was not simply a military campaign, however, and it did not
end in 1521. Over the centuries that followed a slow siege was laid on the underlying
relationship between the waters of the Valley of Mexico and the human, built envi-
ronment. The pre-Hispanic water culture—infrastructures, ideas, and ­practices—
that formed as an adaptation to that place was drastically reshaped in the ongoing
crucible of conquest.
In this chapter I trace the long process of change in the water cultures of
Mesoamerica by focusing on struggles over bathing—over the direct, intimate,
bodily contact between people and waters. I focus here on central, highland
Mesoamerica, especially the Valley of Mexico, because it was the most densely
populated area, with many hot and mineral springs and substantial historical docu-
mentation. It is, however, only one region of what is today Mexico, and although
much of this book is focused on this region, we shall see in later chapters that
people in other places bathed and otherwise engaged with mineral springs and
waters in different ways. Bathing is a topic of inquiry that has not been explored
in Mexican history, partly because documentation of this aspect of water culture is
scant, but also because Díaz del Castillo’s gaze from the top of the Templo Mayor
reveals a blindness shared with scholars—even environmental historians—to the
most common, quotidian interactions with water. This absence is created by the
overwhelming presence in the literature of more strategic questions of hydraulic
infrastructure and state formation. The literature on water has lavished attention
on irrigation and agriculture, but proportionally few people in the long history of
Mexico irrigated anything. Bathing and washing, on the other hand, are the com-
mon contacts with water that most people in the world have, including those who
build, manage, and operate irrigation systems.
The verb “to bathe” signifies, at the very least, a contact between the body and
water, or some other substance that behaves in a similar way, such as sun, dust,
or light. When used to talk about water, the word can signify a range of different
encounters with the liquid. Usually, in today’s English, bathing is thought of as
an act of cleaning one’s body in water, or simply washing parts of one’s body with
water. Bathing can mean immersion in a tub of hot or cold water, using a wet
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    17

cloth or sponge to clean the entire body or parts of it, standing under a shower, or
even sitting in a room filled with steam. Immersion or other contact with water
that does not involve soap or shampoo is less commonly conceived of as bath-
ing, but actively swimming or diving through water, or simply lounging about in
water, is sometimes also described as bathing, as the term “bathing suit” attests. In
today’s Spanish, these overlaps are similarly evident, as the verb to bathe (bañar)
is frequently used to talk about immersion in the ocean or the swimming pool.
The physical activity of swimming for exercise is now more often denoted by the
verb “to swim” (nadar). Bathing in steam, a common practice throughout the
Mediterranean world, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, was also the principal
form of bath for the people of Mexico before and after conquest, all the way up to
the nineteenth century. This Mesoamerican steambath—the temazcal—was called
a baño or “bath” throughout the colonial and national periods, and the bath-
houses, or baños, of Mexico would usually include tubs for immersion as well as a
temazcal. At different moments in different places, these meanings and practices
blurred even more than they do today.

TENOCHTITLÁN: THE CIT Y IN THE LAKE

“The whole body of the city is in the water.”

—Francisco López de Gómara

Source: López de Gómara [1552] 1966: 147.

The Spaniards concentrated themselves and their activity in the highland plateau
of what is today central Mexico, especially the lake-filled Valley of Mexico, home
of the Aztecs. During much of the twentieth century Mexico City held the title of
most populated metropolis in the world, stretching over nine hundred square
miles in a valley surrounded by mountains. Apart from the rainy season between
June and August, it is dry. There are some parks and open spaces, including wet-
lands and lakes near the airport to the east, and in the south in Xochimilco and
Chalco. These watery zones, and the fact that parts of the city flood regularly dur-
ing the rainy season, are reminders that this most urban of spaces was once a
vast shallow lake fed by rivers coursing down the slopes that surround the city
center. Place names also signal the hydraulic foundations of the city. Santa Maria
la Ribera, for example, a neighborhood northwest of the downtown, was on the
shore of the lake until the nineteenth century (ribera means “shore” or “bank”).
Many roads were built on top of rivers that were turned into drainage tunnels
as the city grew: Río Magdalena; Río Churubusco; Río de la Piedad. The waters
18    chapter 2

themselves are hard to find now, as invisible as those tunnels that channel the
huge volume of water falling as rain each summer northward out of the Valley of
Mexico to the Río Tula. This enormous drainage project demands its opposite: an
equally monumental system that brings a flood of freshwater to the city’s pipes and
faucets from hundreds of kilometers away and a kilometer downhill.
During the few centuries before Díaz del Castillo stood on top of the Templo
Mayor, a water culture evolved in the Valley of Mexico that was fundamentally
unlike that which we know today. The inhabitants adapted to living in a lake by
building a highly productive agricultural system of raised-bed fields (chinampas)
on the shores and shallows of the lake that enabled three harvests of the principal
crops—maize, beans, and squash—by maintaining moist soil through the long dry
season. Remnants of these fabled “floating gardens” can still be found operating in
the southern end of Mexico City, in Xochimilco and Chalco. The plains and hills
that surrounded the lake were dry-farmed during the rainy season, or supported
with irrigation through the construction of dams and canals for surface waters
and shallow wells for groundwater.1 The chinampas were also used as nurseries to
produce seedlings that were transplanted to fields farther from the lake once the
rainy season commenced.2 The lake itself—shallow, warm, and bathed in tropi-
cal sunshine—was enormously productive, providing all sorts of food and other
useful materials, and hunting, fishing, and gathering these resources continued to
supply much of the animal protein and other important nutrients up through the
nineteenth century, as well as raw materials used to produce baskets and mats, the
roofs of peasant houses, and many other household objects.3
The surplus generated by these activities supported population growth, urban-
ization, the constitution of political, warrior, artisan, and intellectual classes, and
the creation of an empire.4 The Aztecs formed out of an alliance between the
Mexica who had settled on the island of Tenochtitlán (where the historic cen-
ter of Mexico City is today) in 1325, and their less-powerful partners in Texcoco
and Tlacopan. Together they could mobilize upward of a hundred thousand sol-
diers, and thus were able to defeat the lord of Azcapotzalco in 1428 and dominate
the Valley of Mexico until the Spanish arrived in 1520. The Aztecs, and especially
the rulers of Texcoco, were skilled hydraulic engineers who mobilized the same
masses of subjects who fought as soldiers to build dikes and causeways with roads
that complemented a network of shallow channels dug into the lakebed to facili-
tate canoe traffic.5 The island-city of Tenochtitlán reached a population of eighty
thousand people at its height, fed and supplied by the lake and by the subjects of
its far-flung empire.
Water is unpredictable and powerful. As the city of Tenochtitlán grew, it
responded to the destructive behaviors of the lake with increasingly sophisticated
engineering works that did not so much seek to eliminate the water as tame it. In
the 1440s floods ravaged the city, driving the rulers to take dramatic measures to
protect it from further inundations. In response to the 1446 flood the ground level
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    19

of the city center, with its ceremonial buildings, was raised by the city’s residents
about two meters, and in 1449 Nezahualcóyotl, the ruler of Texcoco who was allied
with Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, the ruler of Tenochtitlán, designed and built an
enormous earthen levee across the entire lake, protecting the city as well as the rich
agricultural lands and the fresh waters of the western shore from the salty waters
that surged into the eastern end of the lake.6 This dike, known as the Albarrada
de Nezahualcóyotl, was 10 feet high and almost 25 feet wide, and stretched from
north to south for some 16 kilometers—an especially mind-boggling achievement
considering there were no beasts of burden in Mesoamerica to do the heavy lifting.
At the same time that these building techniques kept lakewater out of the city and
fields, they also supplied Tenochtitlán with clean water. In 1426 the Mexica ordered
the construction of a raised, two-channel aqueduct that crossed the lake from the
Chapultepec springs.7 They relied upon the expertise of Nezahualcóyotl and his
fellow architects from Texcoco, who shortly before the Spanish arrived built an
irrigation system in the eastern foothills that extended some twenty kilometers
and bound five towns together with shared infrastructure and managerial institu-
tions.8 The enormous amount of social labor required for all these infrastructural
works was commanded through compulsory tribute obligations, which led some
scholars to consider the Aztec empire a form of “irrigation civilization” similar to
those in ancient Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia, where water was controlled by
a supremely powerful state.9
Our understanding of large-scale processes of infrastructure construction, agri-
culture, urbanization, and state formation in the Valley of Mexico before conquest
is relatively solid; we know much less about the daily activities that formed the
substance of those processes. People literally lived in and on the water. The build-
ings in some of the villages on the lakeshore, such as Coyoacan and Iztapalapa,
were built on stilts so that the rising and receding lake waters could pass beneath
them. The seasons were marked by the ebb and flow of the lake as it filled with rain
and dried again, the life cycles of the flora and fauna that lived in the lake, and the
livelihood practices that depended on that water. Hunting, fishing, and collecting
provided much of the animal protein, often in the form of insects and their larva,
as well as materials for houses and household objects.10 Salt, a key necessity for the
largely vegetable diet, was extracted from the salt flats on the eastern shores of the
lake by washing the soil and boiling the resulting brine.
The commingling of land and water in the Valley of Mexico was mirrored in
the ideas and beliefs of the people. The indigenous people in the central highlands
of Mexico, and throughout Mesoamerica, shared a complicated understanding of
the constitution and order of the universe, and the place of people in it. In this
“cosmovision” the land was considered to be surrounded by water far to the east
and west, and water filled the depths underneath the land.11 The hills were perme-
ated with water, and the springs and rivers that sprung forth from that watery
land were met by the celestial waters of the rain. The god Tlaloc ruled over this
20    chapter 2

watery underworld realm, as well as the lightning, thunder, and rain that were
generated by the mountainous heights and fell from the skies above. Water was
both the source of life and fertility as well as a worrisome and destructive force,
whose complacence sometimes required the sacrifice of children. This cosmovi-
sion mapped onto the experience of living in the landscape of lakes, islands, wet-
lands, and canals of the Valley of Mexico.
The fields, towns, and cities of the Valley of Mexico were saturated with lakewa-
ter, and wading, swimming, and diving were daily activities.12 There are few com-
ments about these kinds of activities by Spanish or Indian chroniclers, however.
During the conquest and early colonial period the Spanish observers noticed the
cleanliness of the people and the cities, and the frequent washing and bathing of
all ranks of people. The cities of Tenochtitlán and Texcoco built urban water sys-
tems for public use, and in the streets of Tenochtitlán there were public latrines.
Chroniclers of the conquest of Tenochtitlán remarked upon the orderliness, ampli-
tude, and particularly the cleanliness of the public spaces, where human waste was
collected and transported to the agricultural fields so that agricultural production
was increased and little sewage entered directly into the water.13 The houses of the
small noble class in Tenochtitlán were plumbed for water, and in Moctezuma’s pal-
ace there was a “beautiful fountain with lots of water that flowed through under-
ground pipes to other parts of the house.”14 The houses of the elite also featured
private steambaths, or temazcales, and the commoners made use of public ones
built by the rulers.15 While people may have washed their hands or other body
parts in cold water, bathing for hygiene, cleanliness, and ceremonial reasons took
place in these temazcales. For drinking, clean water from the aqueduct was col-
lected in canoes, or from the fountains, and sold by water merchants. In this water
culture, extensive hydraulic infrastructures encouraged a wide range of uses and
intimate daily contacts with water, an experience organized by elaborate ideas and
concepts ranging from sophisticated knowledge of the qualities of different kinds
of water and their effects on agriculture, to a deeply felt respect for maintaining the
cleanliness of both their bodies and the lakewater around them.

BAT H I N G I N T H E M E D I T E R R A N E A N WO R L D

It is clear that the practices, meanings, and infrastructures of bathing in Mexico

today are products of a long encounter between Europe and America, and water
cultures in Tenochtitlán in 1490, on the eve of contact, were not the same as those
in Andalusia. But while the conquest of the Americas was obviously an antagonis-
tic meeting between people of two continents with no prior contact, to understand
how the fusion of the two transpired it is essential to remember that on both sides
of the encounter the peoples and cultures were already fusions of many earlier
encounters. Furthermore, portraying Mexican water cultures as a colonial fusion
of “Spanish” and “indigenous” directs attention away from the enormous changes
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    21

that occurred between 1492 and the present day, in favor of the curation of hypos-
tasized cultural survivals. Rather than cast Mexican water cultures in Mexico as
the mixing, or mestizaje, of some fixed set of European bathing traits on the one
hand and those of indigenous “deep Mexico”16 on the other, I will start by show-
ing how those traditions were already products of previous encounters. We have
seen, for example, how the Mexica incorporated the engineering expertise of
Nezahualcóyotl and other Texcocans in building Tenochtitlán, the city in the lake.
In this section I argue that the colonial bathing encounter was shaped in important
ways by the deep religious and cultural conflicts in Iberia during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
The general contours of the culture of bathing in Spain and the rest of mod-
ern Europe and the Mediterranean were established by the Romans, who carried
a standard set of practices and infrastructures throughout the Near East, North
Africa, and Europe, which, long after the fall of that empire, continued to be
reshaped and reproduced. The Roman bath included different rooms with hot,
warm, and cold pools of water, as well as dressing rooms and steam rooms, and
these different baths served different purposes in line with specific conceptions
of human health and biology. Hot pools and steambaths were believed to open
the pores of the skin and allow the transpiration of unwanted substances from
the body; cold water closed the pores again. Under the advice of a doctor, bathing
in the correct kinds and temperatures of water exercised a positive influence on
the humors of the body, correcting for imbalances. Going to the bath, or bathing,
could mean swimming or lounging in any temperature of water or soaking up
the humid heat of the steam room, a wide array of different contacts with water
that continue to define bathing today. The waters themselves were also varied, as
Roman baths utilized both thermal mineral springs as well as freshwater sources
heated artificially. The particular qualities of all these different waters were appre-
ciated for their therapeutic effects, and mineral waters were valued as powerful
curative agents.17
The Roman baths were social centers, and many of the activities of daily life
were carried out within their walls. People gossiped, ate food, exercised and played
games, had sex, relaxed, hatched plans, and carried out affairs of business and gov-
ernment. By bringing wealthy and powerful men together, the baths were settings
for the consolidation of the patrician class. At its zenith of wealth and power the
city of Rome counted more than four hundred bathhouses, and there were hun-
dreds if not thousands more scattered throughout the empire. Each of the mineral
water spas was known for the particular properties of its waters and their cura-
tive uses.18 The sociality of bathing in the Roman world also involved religious or
spiritual dimensions, and baths were dedicated to gods of both the Romans and
those they subjugated.19 Roman towns throughout the empire were built on exist-
ing indigenous settlements with springs that held religious and social significance.
The Roman baths in Bath, England, for example, were named “Aquae Sulis” in
22    chapter 2

dedication to Sulis-Minerva, a hybrid entity that fused the Roman god of wisdom
with what was most likely a water deity of western England, on the far edge of
empire.
Water culture in the Iberian Peninsula was not a pure cultural product, waiting
to be carried to an encounter with “indigenous” bathing in the Americas, but rather
a continually changing, multistranded “selective tradition.”20 The Arabs played an
especially important role in this process, rebuilding and conserving many baths in
Europe and the Mediterranean world built on hot springs. They were experts in
hydraulic engineering, and during the High Middle Ages (“baja edad media”: elev-
enth to fifteenth centuries) when they governed the Iberian Peninsula they con-
structed more sophisticated and remarkably more extensive urban and rural water
infrastructure than had previously existed. Bathhouses were common through-
out the Arab world, and this of course extended throughout Spain. Contrary to
some popular ideas about the medieval period, bathing and bathhouses continued
to exist in Europe and enjoyed a resurgence in the tenth to twelfth centuries.21
The baths of Barcelona, for example, were founded by the Arabs long before they
passed into the hands of the Christian nobility, while the baths in Gerona were
founded anew in 1194. Córdoba, the capital of the western Caliphate, was said
to have nine hundred baths for eight hundred thousand inhabitants.22 In Spain,
Arabs inherited and advanced the legacy of Greek and Roman literature, medi-
cine, and cultural practices, conserving those works and codifying bathing culture
in Islamic religious practice.23 The Ottomans, who ruled much of southeastern
Europe and the eastern Mediterranean between 1300 and 1900, also reproduced
and reshaped bathing practices and ideas, built bathhouses, and generated further
borderlands bathing encounters.

T H E E C L I P SE O F BAT H I N G I N SPA I N , 1 5 0 0 – 1 6 0 0

The selective tradition of bathing in Iberia was forged in a context of prolonged

religious and political conflict between Muslims and Christians. Bathing in medi-
eval Spain was supported by a body of medical literature that came from Greco-
Roman and Arab traditions and reproduced the organization of the bath around
the Roman model with the cold room, warm room, hot room, dressing room,
and resting room. Within the medical model elaborated by the Roman physician
Galen, to which most doctors adhered well into the eighteenth century, bath-
ing was important for carrying off the remains of digestion, which formed one
of six groups of things—called “non-natural” or “necessary” things—that were
not intrinsic to human bodies. Bathing, exercise, and sex, all of which produced
sweat and the emission of fluids, eliminated the remnants of these things from the
body, and following Aristotle, balance and moderation was considered the cor-
rect way to deal with them.24 Arab scholars such as Avicenna, who carried forth
the Roman and Greek intellectual traditions in medieval Spain, delineated four
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    23

kinds of baths—freshwater, seawater, hot springs, and steambaths. Medieval doc-

tors described the effects and uses of different waters, such as sulfurous or ferrugi-
nous (iron) springs, and the only proscription to bathing came from those doctors
who argued that very hot steambaths were dangerous because they disrupted
the humors. In Arab Spain there was a good deal of tolerance and coordination
among different groups to enable access by all to the bathhouses. In the baths of
Castille, women and men bathed on alternate days, with Jews bathing on Fridays
and Sundays.25 Similar schemes to enable access to baths by different groups in
pluricultural societies were common in the Mediterranean world until the twenti-
eth century, especially in bathhouses that utilized hot springs, which are by nature
singular and limited sources that cannot be multiplied or expanded.26
Then, in the sixteenth century, people in Spain stopped bathing. María José
Ruiz Somavilla has argued that understandings of cleanliness and bathing under-
went a fundamental adjustment at this time, due to two kinds of historical factors.27
First, Christians only recently finalized the long struggle with Arab rulers over
the Iberian Peninsula—the Reconquista—and distrust and hostility by Christians
toward Muslims and Jews generated over centuries was codified under Christian
hegemony as forced religious conversions, laws forbidding suspect activities, and
the policing of customs by the Inquisition. At the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury bathing institutions passed from Arab to Christian control, as was the case for
the fifty bathhouses in Malaga that were given by the conquering Catholic kings
to the Church.28 Soon, however, these bathhouses and the very practice of bath-
ing came under scrutiny for they were linked to the customs of “infidels,” who
according to the racial concepts at the time were compelled to bathe by “inherited
blood.”29 Abstinence from bathing, by this same logic, was evidence of Christian
ancestry and a badge of purity. Converts, or “new Christians,” were banned from
working in the bathhouses in 1527, and by 1567 these attitudes toward bathing
hardened into a decree forbidding bathhouses and bathing in Granada.
Following the legal measures against bathing and bathers, people were brought
before the Tribunal of the Inquisition, tortured and punished, under accusations
of bathing or even for being too clean. The suspects were often women, and from
the declarations before the tribunal, it seems that what excited the imaginations
of Christian men was the combination of hot water and nudity.30 Moorish men,
however, did not escape persecution for bathing. Bartolomé Sánchez, for exam-
ple, confessed to bathing in 1597 and was imprisoned with loss of all property.
Miguel Cañete, a gardener, was tried and tortured in 1606 under the accusation
that he washed in the fields where he was working.31 The rejection of bathing in the
­sixteenth century, although enforced by capital punishment, was never total, and
bathhouses remained open in many parts of Spain until the prohibition of 1567.
Even with the prohibition, bathhouses in Andalusia remained open and bathing
in private seems to have continued or perhaps even increased in inverse propor-
tion to the reduction of public bathing. Furthermore, accusations of heresy were
24    chapter 2

directed most often at those known or suspected to be Jews, Muslims, or recent

converts to Christianity, and so bathing was not as risky a proposal for others.
Most likely it was those unimpeachable Christians who were seen returning to the
water in the early 1600s, bathing publicly, in groups, in cold rivers and streams.
Although it was more acceptable and visible by that point, people probably never
fully stopped swimming and bathing in rivers and springs during the second half
of the sixteenth century, despite the prohibitory attitudes and decrees.
Sexuality and morality were an area of anxiety associated with bathing, and
ideas of health were closely related to those about masculinity, custom, and nature.
The health of an individual was maintained through balance and moderation
in one’s customs (costumbres), for customary behaviors were considered indis-
sociable from an individual’s “nature.”32 In this deeply conservative perspective,
health was attained by avoiding excess (deleite) and disordered appetites, for bal-
anced and moderate habits resulted in a healthful physiological character. Nature/
custom was considered to be the best doctor, and the best remedies for ailments
were to be found in nature and good customs. In this conceptual universe, bath-
ing one’s entire body by immersion in hot water or steam was easily construed as
an extreme act and thus a problem. The virility of men, in particular, was seen to
diminish from bathing, an idea that Ruíz Somavilla attributes in part to the idea
that men had sex with men in bathhouses. The larger fear, rooted in a concat-
enation of moral norms concerning religion, sex, gender, and citizenship, was, as
Fadrique Enríquez wrote at the time, that in the baths the soldiers of Christendom
“would be made accustomed to luxury, delicate and vice-ridden, unhealthy …
skinny, without virtue, cowardly and fearful.”33
The second set of sociohistorical factors that were driving a slow reconcep-
tualization of bathing and cleanliness among intellectuals had to do with the
incipient formation of merchant capital and the spread of Renaissance thought.
As European powers reached out to control far-flung empires, trade networks, and
colonies during the sixteenth century, the merchants who made fortunes from
this new global trade formed a social group that did not fit into the old regime of
peasants, artisans, nobles, and church. While not nobles, the emergent bourgeoisie
wielded the economic power to consume the array of commodities that were cap-
tured by global webs of trade in the early modern world. The increasingly impor-
tant idea that men should maintain balance in their customs and not overindulge
in food, drink, sleep, sex, and other pleasures can also be read as a warning to the
new bourgeoisie, and to those who sought to emulate their customs.34 At the same
time, the medieval belief that social status was inherited through lineage—“purity
of blood”—became more flexible and elite social status required more visible proof
in the form of material culture and customs. Cleanliness was one area in which
social, moral, religious, and class distinctions were established. While full-body
bathing was unacceptable in sixteenth-century Spain, keeping one’s hands and
face clean took on an increasingly important role. The lightness of the visible parts
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    25

of the body, maintained by washing, was seen as a sign of purity of blood, and
placed the bather beyond reproach.
The abolition of bathhouses and many forms of bathing put doctors in a dif-
ficult bind. They continued to read and respect the foundational works of Pliny,
Aristotle, Galen, and other classical and medieval scholars who recommended
bathing for curing diseases and maintaining healthfulness, but these ideas were
increasingly at odds with the political culture of the time. Doctors resolved this
contradiction by arguing that the bathing activities of the Romans and Greeks
had healing properties in antiquity but not in the present. Thus bathing actually
did have benefits, but the damage caused by any abrupt change in custom was
greater than the benefit that could be gained by adopting bathing practices anew.
The long-accepted idea that bathing was good because it opened the pores of the
skin and allowed for “exhalation” of unwanted substances, was turned around to
argue for the threat of contagion from the environment entering through those
same open pores. The malleability to the point of outright incoherence given to
medical concepts so that they would correspond to the social field of forces in the
sixteenth century prompted one scholar of the topic to characterize attitudes and
ideas about bathing as “ideological.”35
Changes in ideas about bathing were accompanied by changes in practices.
Full-body immersion and steambaths were viewed with suspicion throughout
Europe. Instead, people engaged in a more limited washing of the face and hands,
as well as the practice of “dry bathing,” which was the changing, and washing,
of linens, rather than the body itself. “Dry bathing”—the washing of underwear,
really—eliminated the body’s “exhalations” that were captured by undergarments.
Among the wealthy, undergarments became far more conspicuous during this
time, protruding from sleeves and collars as a display of the hygienic customs—
and social status—of the wearer.36
Eventually in the seventeenth century bathing came back into fashion and
people—first commoners, then elites—went back into the rivers and the ther-
mal springs. In Italy and France, the recovery of Roman and Greek texts stirred a
rebirth of hot spring bathing among nobles, a practice that was copied elsewhere
in Europe, and which also fomented bathing among the emergent bourgeoi-
sie.37 As intellectuals relearned the texts from antiquity about water and health,
Europeans adopted the installations and aesthetics of Classical bathing, conserv-
ing the wide array of bathing infrastructure and practices—hot and cold pools,
steambaths, showers—as well as the rich social, sexual, and spiritual dimensions
inherited from the Roman baths and recast in the Middle Ages in Christian terms.

BAT H I N G B Y I M M E R SIO N I N M E S OA M E R IC A

Bathing would once again become acceptable practice in the seventeenth century,
but in the 1500s bathing held deep and powerful connotations of sexual and religious
26    chapter 2

danger and was closely monitored. And it was in this context that the Spaniards
arrived in the Americas to confront far greater cultural difference and distrust than
that which characterized the relation between Christians, Jews, and Moors in Iberia.
Like writing, worshipping, and so many other activities carried out by the indigenous
people of the Americas, bathing came under intense scrutiny in the New World.
Strange as it might seem, there is no evidence that anyone in Mesoamerica
soaked in hot water before the Spanish conquest. It is not that there was no con-
tact with water: on the contrary, bodily contact with water was a central part of
daily life for Mexicans before and after contact, and the chronicles written dur-
ing the early colonial period remark on the cleanliness and bathing habits of the
indigenous people.38 Díaz del Castillo in his tale of the conquest of Tenochtitlán
told of the liberal daily bathing customs of the Aztec elite, and of the barbers who
groomed Tlaxcalans. Documents from after the conquest suggest a number of
ways that indigenous people washed with water. The indigenous authors of the
sixteenth-century Florentine Codex depicted a person sitting by a pool and pour-
ing water over his head and body with a gourd (see Figure 2). In hot lowlands
areas such as Veracruz, Yucatan, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, people bathed
and swam in rivers and other bodies of freshwater. In the Zapotec dictionaries
compiled by Spanish priests, for example, there are words for bathing and for soap,
which indicates that bathing was done for cleanliness. There was even a word that
specifically denoted “waters to bathe in.”39 Gerónimo de Mendieta, a Franciscan
missionary in highland Mexico in the mid-sixteenth century, wrote approvingly of
the custom of mothers to bathe their children in the cold water of “streams, rivers
and springs, first thing in the morning,” which he maintained made them stronger,
as Aristotle had said it would.40 According to Diego de Landa, a priest traveling in
Yucatan, “the Indian women bathed often with cold water like the men, and with
little modesty, for they undressed and were naked at the place they went to fetch
water.”41 Mayan women apparently “bathed a lot, simply covering themselves from
the view of the men with their hands.”42 I have found no mention anywhere, how-
ever, of indigenous people soaking in hot water.
Despite everyday washing and swimming in cold water, waters were seen to
hold dangers, and rivers and creeks held powers that many indigenous people
feared.43 This was most likely also true for hot thermal springs, for there is no men-
tion by any of the early chroniclers of indigenous people bathing in these waters. It
is possible that the practice did exist, but did not make it into the historical record.
But there is also no documentary or archeological evidence that people bathed
by immersion in waters they heated themselves; no pre-Hispanic bathtubs, for
example. If it was a common practice we should expect there to be documentation:
nude bathing by immersion in hot water was a particularly troubling activity for
priests and government officials engaged in the struggle over the Spanish bath-
houses in the sixteenth century, and if there were such activity in the Americas, it
would certainly have captured their worried attention.
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    27

Figure 2. An Aztec man taking a bath. Drawing from the Codex Florentino, compiled by
Bernardo de Sahagún, c. 1540. Granger Collection, with permission of Age Fotostock.

What makes the absence of any mention of bathing by immersion in hot water
even stranger is that hot springs abound in Mexico. Juan de Cárdenas, a doc-
tor born in Seville who lived in Guadalajara at the end of the sixteenth century,
remarked upon the “great number of hot springs,” and reasoned that their heat was
derived from the sulfur that they contain.44 Despite these remarks and all the men-
tions of the cleanliness and bathing habits of indigenous people in Mexico by the
Spanish colonizers, there is no record that indigenous people in pre-Colombian
28    chapter 2

Mesoamerica went into those hot mineral springs, or that they were a part of
indigenous medicine. This absence is especially striking, because there were hot
springs in the parts of the Mesoamerican highlands that were most densely popu-
lated, and these were put to use for bathing by Spaniards after the conquest. The
principal hot springs in the Valley of Mexico were located on a volcanic island
that jutted out of the lake east of Tenochtitlán, now a hill known as Peñón de los
Baños. In conquest-period documents and indigenous codices, the island with the
hot springs is described as an off-limits hunting reserve owned by Aztec nobility,
like the forest of Chapultepec, without any reference to bathing or other use of
the springs.45 This is also the case with other well-known hot springs. Codices—­
pictorial documents produced by indigenous scribes during the contact and early
conquest periods—mention the hot springs at Ixtapan de la Sal for the production
of salt, not for bathing, and Oaxtepec, Morelos, was known for its royal Aztec
botanical garden rather than its hot springs.46 The mineral waters of Tehuacán,
Puebla, which became important for their therapeutic properties in the colonial
period, were used in pre-Hispanic times for irrigation and salt production, as were
those of the warm mineral waters in Hierve el Agua, Oaxaca.47 Inca rulers soaked
in Andean hot springs, but there is no evidence of a similar use of hot springs
in Mesoamerica.48
Even after Spanish contact there is little record of bathing by immersion in
hot water or hot springs. Records point to bathing by Spaniards who, despite the
prohibitions on using bathhouses in Granada, built a bathhouse at Peñón de los
Baños and, by 1600, were building similar installations elsewhere.49 The sole men-
tion of indigenous practices of bathing by immersion in hot water comes from
San Bartolomé Agua Caliente, a town in today’s Guanajuato that was founded in
1541 by Fernando de Tapia, a Christianized indigenous leader who allied with the
Spaniards in the conquest and colonization of the Bajio. His daughter, Beatriz de
Tapia, is credited with providing, in her last will and testament in 1602, the land,
springs, and money to build a hospital in San Bartolomé to serve “indios naturales
y pobres,” a project that was not completed until the late eighteenth century.50 It is
unclear whether the indigenous people in that region bathed in those hot springs
before the Spaniards and their indigenous allies colonized the area, but if they did
it is certainly strange that there is no mention of this practice by Spanish priests.

T H E T E M A ZC A L

Instead of soaking in hot water, indigenous people in Mesoamerica took steam-

baths or saunas. In the same paragraph quoted above where he talks about cold-
water washing, De Landa goes on to describe the less-common practice of bathing
with “hot water and fire,” which he says was done “for health reasons rather than
cleanliness.”51 It is clear that this was not bathing by immersion, as De Landa lists
two kinds of bathing: washing with cold water, and going to the steambath, or
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    29

temazcal. Washing was more clearly aimed at cleaning the skin, while the temazcal
was a therapeutic, medicinal, and spiritual activity with strong social dimensions.
The unimportance of bathing by immersion in hot water, naturally or artificially
heated, is directly related to the importance of the steambath in Mesoamerica.
The temazcal was an important part of life for Native Americans from the Pacific
Northwest to Central America, save for the foragers of the arid lands of northern
Mexico and the western United States.52 In Mesoamerica—from about Nicaragua
to the Tropic of Cancer—people bathed in smallish structures of masonry or adobe
(often referred to by anthropologists as “sweatlodges”) into which heated stones
were placed. Water was then thrown upon the hot rocks to make steam. Sometimes
the sweatlodge shared a wall made of volcanic rock with an exterior fire chamber so
that the heat of the fire would pass through that rock to the bathing chamber. Water
was tossed on that rock to create steam for bathing. Bathers would symbolically
enter the underworld when they passed through the door of the temazcal, which
in preconquest time in Mesoamerica usually displayed a statue of Tezcatlipoca, the
god of healing and the underworld.53 Other images of gods were also displayed,
including that of Tocitzin, or Teteo Innan, sometimes called “grandmother of the
temazcal.”54 Temazcales have been found in elite and everyday residences in the
Mayan region built at least seven hundred years before the arrival of the Spaniards,
indicating a deep history of bathing practices and beliefs.55 Temazcal steambaths
remain an important part of life in indigenous areas of Mesoamerica.
The temazcal was a ubiquitous and multifaceted institution in Mesoamerica
that played roles in cleanliness, therapy, socialization, sexuality, religion, and agri-
culture.56 The Spanish, however, understood Native American culture in terms
of their own ideas of morality and decency, and they sought to banish sexuality,
religion and magic from the temazcal in order to reshape it as a social practice
dedicated to health and cleanliness. There are many laudatory mentions by the
conquistadores of how well groomed the indigenous people were owing to their
frequent washing, but the steambath was barely tolerated and particular religious
and sexual practices associated with it were singled out as unacceptably offensive
and subject to investigation and eradication. The assault on bathing and bath-
houses during the 1500s in Spain was an assault on the religious, ethnic dimen-
sions that did not conform to the ascendant Christian view of society and culture.
When the popularity of bathing returned in the 1600s, it was no longer associated
with religion and socialization among particular subaltern ethnic groups such as
Moors and Jews, but rather with practices of health and cleanliness practiced by
the nobility and emergent bourgeoisie, as well as those who emulated them. This
turn to cleanliness and health was also imposed on the American temazcal, with
one result being the loss of historical knowledge about other facets of bathing, and
another the predominance of therapeutic uses.57
Sex in the bathhouse was the biggest concern, and what we know about the sex-
ual aspects of using the temazcal comes from official prohibitions, condemnations,
30    chapter 2

Figure 3. A temazcal. Drawing from the Codice Magliabechanio. Source: Wikipedia Com-
mons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Magliabechiano_(folio_77r).jpg#/
media/File:Codex_Magliabechiano_(folio_77r).jpg.

and persecutions. One text tells of “many naked indian men and women commit-
ting within [the bath] a great ugliness and sin.”58 In 1569 a priest penned a series
of questions about sexuality in the temazcal, to be asked to Native Americans at
confession: “Did you sin with any women [in the bath]? Was one of them your
family member or someone you know … your sister or your sister-in-law? Did
you by chance kiss a woman, holding her breasts, touching her, wanting her and
coveting her?”59 Another priest noted that the temazcal was “illicitly used by men
with women, and men with men,” surely a problem for those who, operating under
heteronormative assumptions, tried to eradicate sexual encounters in the baths
by separating men and women.60 Despite the efforts of the church and govern-
ment to banish such practices and limit the function of steambaths to health and
cleanliness, temazcales indeed were, and would remain, spaces of unseen and
unsanctioned sociality among different ages and sexes of indigenous people. An
ethnographer studying the use of the temazcal in Chiapas today notes their con-
tinued association with sexuality.61
The temazcal proved to be an exceptionally strong institution, and as the colo-
nial encounter progressed, the use of the temazcal extended into other racial-
ethnic groups, including Spaniards who built private temazcales in their houses.62
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    31

Increasingly the concerns about bathing were framed as a problem of public order
and health, as well as a problem of sin.63 In 1646 the Crown created an office called
the Royal Protomedicato, an official group of doctors and medical experts who
were in charge of inspecting pharmacies and apothecaries, reviewing medical pub-
lications, examining and licensing doctors, and prosecuting customs and practices
that contradicted scientific and Christian principles.64 The Protomedicato had nei-
ther the responsibility nor the ability to oversee customs among indigenous people,
and so mostly focused its attention on the Spanish and casta groups. However, the
temazcal, which was strongly associated with indigenous culture although used
widely in New Spain, was an important concern of the viceregal government and
the Protomedicato in particular. And so, when the Royal Crime Office decried the
temazcal for inciting men to engage in sodomy, the viceroy was forced to act.65 The
viceroy Conde de Monclova (1686–88) decided to keep the temazcales open, but in
the subsequent administration of the Conde de Galve (1688–1696) they were closed
while two doctors, Ambrosio de la Lima and Joséph de Oliver, conducted a study
to determine the social and medical dangers and benefits of this form of bathing.66
In the report published by the two doctors in 1692, their scientific opinion
about the benefits of bathing was strongly informed by the idea that Spaniards
and Indians were different races of humans with different physical constitutions.
De la Lima and de Oliver concluded that the temazcales were useful for the well-
being of indigenous people, in particular, but also for Spaniards and castas, “what-
ever their color.” That said, the doctors suggested that “for Spaniards, water baths
would be more useful than temazcales because white people have a more severe
temperament” that would be “offended by steambaths.”67 This advice was informed
by humoralism, a theory inherited from the Greeks and Romans which held that
­bodies—and here races of bodies—were characterized by different balances of
blood (air), phlegm (water), yellow bile (fire), and black bile (earth), which pro-
duced the particular emotional and physical constitutions of individuals and races.
By reiterating the acceptability of bathing for health and cleanliness, and con-
demning bathing for social, sexual, and religious purposes, the 1692 study and
others published later in the eighteenth century helped reshape quotidian bath-
ing practices and water cultures more generally. Despite the 1692 vindication, and
the spread of the steambath throughout society, it continued to hover between
acceptance and prohibition, and was an ongoing object of concern for the colonial
government. Around 1725, for example, temazcales were prohibited in the indig-
enous pueblo of San Juan Teotihuacan, causing loud protest, and in 1741 the census
ordered by the first viceroy Conde de Revillagigedo counted twenty-four temazcal
bathhouses, double the permitted number.68 The complicated mix of benefits from
curation and cleanliness and dangers of sexuality and sensual exaltation, as well as
the fact that the temazcal was by the eighteenth century an accepted activity that
extended throughout all levels and groups of colonial society, mobilized constant
patrolling of the practice.
32    chapter 2

C O N C LU SIO N : C O L O N IA L WAT E R C U LT U R E S

As they rebuilt and expanded Tenochtitlán, transforming it into Mexico City, the
capital of New Spain, the Spanish elite slowly replaced the lacustrine system with
one modeled on that which they knew back home. It was incremental change
in many interrelated aspects of life: the environment, the culture, the economy.
Floods devastated the growing city in the second half of the sixteenth century,
prompting officials to embark on an enormous, centuries-long project to drain the
Valley of Mexico. In carrying out this project they ignored and denied the uses and
meanings given to the liquid by indigenous peasants who depended on complex
wetland ecologies for their livelihoods, in favor of the notion that water was an
input in production and a threat to a city that should not be wet.69 Colonial public
works extended those erected by the Aztecs to protect Tenochtitlán from flood-
ing and provide freshwater, but they started from different cultural assumptions
about the environment and the relation of humans to it and to one another. In
confronting the peculiar environment of the Valley of Mexico the Spaniards were
guided by a view of nature and humans inherited from scholars who lived in dry
places—Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna, and Pliny—and this view did not lead
them to a harmonious and successful adaptation. In the process the Mesoamerican
water culture that was relatively well adapted to the environment was dissolved,
reworked, and transformed. As Alain Musset puts it, “the battle to control water
was as cultural as it was technical.”70
The very method of Spanish rule assured the continuity of indigenous water
cultures, however. Like the Aztec rulers before them, the Spanish focused on con-
trolling land and labor and extracting tribute. The indigenous peasant economy
was the basis for the reproduction of the labor that enriched the Spaniards, and was
left alone in many ways. The Spaniards did not try to eradicate hunting, fishing,
and collecting resources, and alongside these basic economic activities, beliefs and
ideas concerning water also persisted through the colonial period.71 Both Spanish
rulers and the indigenous ones before them made herculean efforts to keep water
from flooding the island-city and to provide clean freshwater for its expanding
population. The Aztecs built levees and raised the city up by filling in the lakebed;
the Spaniards lowered the lakewaters by draining the Valley. The indigenous rulers
built a kilometers-long aqueduct across the lake to bring clean freshwater from the
springs at Chapultepec to the island-city of Tenochtitlán. The Spaniards adopted
the same solution, rebuilding the aqueduct to channel new sources of fresh water
into the city even as they drained water away from it.72 This massive project to
drain the Valley and bring in water was carried out by indigenous workers and the
Spaniards learned from them.
Quotidian understandings of and engagements with water shifted as well.
Indigenous people took steambaths rather than bathe by immersion, and hot
mineral springs were apparently not utilized. The temazcal remained important
 Bathing and Domination in the Early Modern Atlantic World    33

in Mesoamerica, spreading as a practice through all social castes and classes, facili-
tated, perhaps, by a long-standing familiarity with the Moorish steambath among
the Spanish that was not entirely negative. But the holistic practice involving reli-
gion, sexuality, and ideas about human and agricultural fecundity was narrowed
through repression to concentrate on health and cleanliness. On the other hand, in
the first century of conquest Europeans started the practice of bathing by immer-
sion in hot water and, in particular, in the hot springs of highland Mexico. This
form of bathing, and all its associated European ideas about health and the cura-
tive properties of waters, also spread through the different castes and classes of
colonial society. By the eighteenth century, both immersion baths and temazcales
were common in the bathhouses of Mexico. These colonial baths and bathing
practices were, in turn, subject to new forms of scrutiny and regulation in the age
of the Enlightenment.
 3

Policing Waters and Baths in

Eighteenth-Century Mexico City

Judge Baltasar Ladrón de Guevara walked through the streets slowly but ner-
vously, attentive to the air of tension. After several drought years water and food
was scarce in the capital, and he worried that in 1785 Mexico might see the kind
of social unrest that recently beset Spain. He paused frequently to ask questions
of people in the street, and so that the officials who accompanied him could
record his comments and note the precise geographical coordinates of the issues
he encountered. Returning many times to wander the same neighborhoods, he
grappled conceptually with the diversity of peoples and castas that formed the
city’s immense underclass. It was an age of revolutions, and to deal with that
instability Ladrón de Guevara was taking a new approach to government. His
long walks and careful social study of Mexico City were aimed at understand-
ing and improving the underlying organization of society and its relation to the
environment.

Source: De Gortari Rabiela 2012: 122–23.

Enlightenment reformers like Diego Ladrón de Guevara were struck by the amor-
phous, variegated character of Mexico’s underclass—the plebe—and its disorderli-
ness caused them to worry. Mexico City official Hipólito Villaroel, for example,
described this underclass as a “monster of many species.” By 1785 the heteroge-
neity of colonial society overflowed existing legal, political, and socioeconomic
institutions and concepts, prompting Ladrón de Guevara and Villaroel to engage
in a systematic effort to comprehend it and order it anew. After a long period
34
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    35

of careful fieldwork, Ladrón de Guevara designed a new administrative geogra-

phy for Mexico City that he hoped would address social tensions. This was a new
understanding of society and approach to governance that spread throughout
Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth century and was known as “Police.”
In this chapter I analyze ideas about Police in eighteenth-century Mexico City,
and the implementation of those ideas to govern waters, baths, and bathing. Early
modern treatises on government used the concept of Police to describe the dis-
cursive and institutional regulation of territory and population.1 In a sense of the
word that we would recognize today, Police was an institutional apparatus that
operated in a prohibitive fashion to ensure security. Just as important, however,
was another meaning: the wide, positive effort at civilized urban ordering that
focused on aspects of the well-being of the population such as public health, the
provisioning of food and water, and the maintenance of infrastructure. Surely the
actions and ideas of Police were concentrated in the educated, usually European-
born elite that occupied the heights of government in New Spain, but over time
they shaped hydraulic infrastructure and were unevenly internalized and enacted
by everyday people.
Ladrón de Guevara and Villaroel recognized that their ideas and practices of
Police formed part of a material social field that included the environment as well as
the environmental ideas and practices of the varied social groups they were tasked
with regulating. As the eighteenth century advanced, new social groups emerged
and consolidated in Mexico around socioeconomic activity, creole/national iden-
tity, liberalism, and science. I suggest we treat these intergroup relations as dynam-
ics of class, and that we can see them in everyday conflicts over waters and bathing.2
The history of these relations between “rulers and ruled” reveals that the policing
of waters was always partial, selective, contested, and incomplete.

P O L IC I N G T H E E N V I R O N M E N T

There was never enough potable water for the growing urban population in
Mexico City. Beginning in 1548, the Spaniards rebuilt the aqueduct from the
Chapultepec springs to the city center a number of times, and extended it to bring
water from the springs at Santa Fe, high in the western mountains. This urban
hydraulic system served the city as the principal source of clean freshwater for
the next 350 years, and while the government carried out an enormous effort to
drain the Valley of Mexico, the freshwater supply remained relatively constant.
Mercedes (concessions) of water for houses and buildings were costly and hard
to come by, especially as the city grew in the eighteenth century, and most people
received water from the system of public fountains that were also served by the
water distribution system. Water sellers, or aguadores, used these fountains to fill
wagon-borne barrels and large jugs slung across their backs, and sold the liquid
door to door.
36    chapter 3

The relative difficulty and costliness of delivering water made bathing by

immersion at home impossible or impractical for most, and so people went to
bathhouses, or simply bathed in the public fountains or the streams and canals
of the lacustrine city. The latter options were of great concern among reform-
ing elites whose sense of order was affronted by public nudity as well as the use
of the same source for both drinking and bathing. Bathhouses were for bathing
and washing clothes; fountains provided water for cooking and drinking. In this
logic, the city’s temazcales were acceptable to the city’s rulers because they used
relatively little water, and kept the act of bathing away from the potable water
infrastructure.
The scarcity of water in Mexico City was exacerbated by natural events. The
years 1780, 1782, 1784, and 1785 featured drought, which resulted in shortages in
food, famine, and unrest across central Mexico in 1785 and 1786.3 In Mexico City,
a “severe lack of water in the public tanks,” especially the north and east of the city
center, lead to “exasperation and clamor among the poor.”4 In response, officials
implemented scientific water policing measures that emulated those taken by the
Crown in the 1760s in response to similar drought-induced bread riots in Spanish
cities. The first step was a careful study of the environmental and social situa-
tion by the Maestro de Obras (Chief Engineer), who reported to the city council
the leaks all along the aqueduct, the “deterioration of the pipes [most were clay]
which are old and feeble with frequent breaks, the continuous leaking caused by
the porosity of the lead [seals and joints], the Mercedes of water that continue to be
delivered even after their titular owners die, and the excessive waste of the foun-
tains that spill water.”5 The small reservoir (Alberca Chica) in Chapultepec was
locked and the key was lost, and the large reservoir (Alberca Grande) was almost
completely empty, its springwater flowing through an open gate down to the lands
of the nearby hacienda of the Condesa de Miravalle.
Environmental pressures and enlightenment ordering coincided to propel the
policing of new arenas of governmental concern, such as public health. Based on
the report of the maestro, in 1788 the viceroy ordered all the mercedes of water to
be registered and confirmed, and the springs and reservoirs in Chapultepec to
be cleaned and repaired. Especially important was the main canal that delivered
water from the springs in the mountains at Santa Fe to the aqueduct that began in
Chapultepec. The maestro pointed out that the city’s potable water often ran in an
open ditch, and that people along the canal used the water for drinking, irrigating
their fields, and bathing.6 To prevent unacceptable use and contamination of the
city’s potable water by the bodies of its residents, the viceroy asked the maestro to
cover the aqueduct and fence it off. Two years later the viceroy complained that
despite these measures no positive increment in water levels was seen in the city,
and ordered a report on the effects of the infrastructural changes. He further-
more ordered the maestro to build ditches to capture the runoff water from the
Chapultepec springs and channel it back to the aqueduct that led to the city center.
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    37

The policing of the city’s infrastructure included attempts to control bathing

practices among peasants and urban poor, and worry extended to the ways peo-
ple interacted with the liquid and with each other. The fountains in Mexico City
provided water to most of the population, and were seen as an especially impor-
tant site for the promotion of good health. In 1786 the viceroy Manuel Antonio
Florez denounced the custom of the poor of using the water that spilled from
the fountains and leaked from the pipes for bathing and washing, activities “not
at all appropriate for the public streets” that caused “discomfort for pedestrians,
complaints and risks.”7 Bathing and washing clothes in the canals and fountains of
the public water system were prohibited and punished, which circumscribed poor
people’s access to and interactions with water. In 1790 the Conde de Revillagigedo
tried to stop people from “bathing in the public canals” in Mexico City by ordering
the construction of a public bathhouse.8
These enlightened government reforms were often contested. Fountains, like
the springs and rivers that fed them, ran all the time, and much of the water went
unused. They consisted of a spout that poured the water from some height into a
pool or reservoir below, and their design was meant to allow users to take water
from the cascading stream, rather than from the pool, which was considered
unclean. In practice, however, the ranks of aguadores (water carriers) who serviced
most of the population in the city did not wait to fill their amphora from the cas-
cade, instead using the reservoir, which caused great concern among city rulers
about the negative effects of this water on the health of the citizens.9 To remedy
this disorder, in 1790 the Conde de Revillagigedo replaced the central fountain
in the Zocalo and its large pool of water with four smaller fountains, none with
a reservoir. This measure, like many the Conde enacted in his period of reform,
was rejected by the frustrated clotheswashers, bathers, and aguadores, who van-
dalized the new fountains and, in 1794, succeeded in having them dismantled.10
The cleanliness and healthfulness of the water was not as important to them as
plentiful supply and ease of access, but the destruction of the fountains ended up
reducing their access to water. A few years later the neighbors in the barrio of San
Sebastián complained to the city government that there was no fountain nearby,
and so their family members walked a great distance to get water, which resulted in
their sons getting into mischief and their daughters being “deflowered.”11 This and
other complaints identified scarcity as the problem, rather than the unhealthiness
of the water itself, which remained more of a concern of government officials.
Water policing featured strong technological dimensions. A 1792 article in a
Mexican scientific journal identified the cause of “the hydraulic problem” in Mexico
City to be the lack of circulation resulting from the city’s location on a flat lakebed.
In such a “horizontal” city water did not flow well. There was little elevation differ-
ence between one fountain and another, and so the public fountains could not be
connected in a series. The unused water from fountains that ran twenty-four hours
a day could not be efficiently channeled to other fountains, and instead overflowed
38    chapter 3

onto the street and joined the wastewater and rainwater that coursed into the canals
and finally into the lake. Surprisingly, the author found there to be an abundance of
water: the Chapultepec springs alone provided enough water for a city four times
the population of Mexico (home to about 213,000 people at that time). When mea-
sured together with the Santa Fé aqueduct, it seems there was water enough for
millions of inhabitants!12
This situation of both great scarcity and great waste was noted in 1786 by
Ladrón de Guevara, who suggested that bronze faucets be installed, and taps and
plugs be used, on all household fountains so that “no more than the amount of
water necessary for the use of the houses and their neighbors would flow forth,
avoiding in this way the spillage and lost water that runs out of the gutters into
the streets.”13 The author of the 1792 article echoed this impulse to save water and
offered plans for a machine designed to regulate the amount of water that flowed
into the fountains. It was a valve, linked to a float, that would increase the flow
when the fountain’s reservoir was less full, and decrease the flow when it was fuller,
shutting it off completely before the reservoir spilled onto the street. The circula-
tory concept that oriented the building of continuously flowing urban hydraulic
systems was matched by a repudiation of waste, inefficiency, and shortage, and the
design of mechanisms to restrict and administer those flows. Again, these enlight-
ened measures to restrict supply were viewed with suspicion by the people whom
they were intended to benefit. Anticipating that such policing of the environment
would be rejected by the masses of users, the proponent suggested encasing the
machine in a box to shield it from vandals.

P O L IC I N G T H E BAT H HO U SE S

Bathing was a major concern of Police in Enlightenment Mexico City. Enlightened

rulers sought to eradicate bathing and washing in public, and to move these
encounters with water into bathhouses. In Spain, after a century in which
­bathing—especially social bathing—was discouraged, outlawed, and largely eradi-
cated, people took to the water again in the 1600s. During that same period in
Mesoamerica the conquerors repressed the sexual, social, and religious aspects of
temazcal steambathing in favor of bathing for health and medicinal ends, a nego-
tiation which enabled the temazcal as an institution to survive and spread across
racial, ethnic, and class boundaries. Bathing in hot water was introduced by the
Spanish into Mesoamerica, and by the eighteenth century bathing by immersion
was firmly established as an acceptable activity both in Europe and the Americas,
good for promoting a person’s well-being and health. Moreover, bathing in hot
springs had surged back into popularity, and the fashionable practice of taking
waters percolated down from the nobility to the emergent bourgeoisie and other
more humble social groups. Like the temazcal, bathing by immersion in hot water
was considered therapeutic, and the mineral waters themselves were thought to
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    39

be medicinal. As we shall see in chapter 4, the modern science of medicine and

chemistry grew up around the study of these heterogeneous waters, and there was
a surge of interest in Mexican mineral and hot springs at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, stimulated by this inquiry and by an effort on the part of Spain to
generate knowledge about its colonial territories, populations, and resources in
order to generate wealth and govern more efficiently. Thus the increased promi-
nence of bathing was accompanied by heightened policing of the activity. Just as
the anxiety of Spanish priests moved them to chronicle temazcal bathing practices
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the enlightenment project of policing
the boundaries of the acceptable generated documentation that today provides a
window onto the everyday practices of bathing that made up a central part of the
water culture of the time.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the bathhouse in Mexico City was an
accepted and commonplace institution with its own infrastructural and social
requirements. Bathhouses usually offered facilities for immersion, steambathing,
and the washing of laundry. They were located in houses that were large enough to
accommodate a number of tubs (placeres) grouped in a single room or separated
into individual stalls. Some bathhouses offered only cold baths, but in those that
offered hot water there was a boiler in another room. The temazcal was a fixture
in the bathhouses, occupying an open space such as a patio or courtyard where
smoke from the fire could dissipate. The baths required a concession of water, or
merced, from the government of Mexico City, a privilege which only larger build-
ings usually enjoyed. Houses, or institutions that grouped many people under a
single roof, such as schools, hospitals, and religious orders, had mercedes of water.
The merced allowed the building owner to install an intake pipe from the city’s
water distribution system, which then could be used to fill a tank or reservoir.
Mercedes were limited in number and new ones were seldom awarded. Most
inhabitants of the city did not have pipes in their homes and instead carried water
from public fountains or bought water from aguadores.
Bathhouses were owned and operated in a variety of ways. Some were run as
businesses, with the income derived from charging people to use the placeres and
temazcales. Other baths were run as charities, especially by religious orders that
tended to provide bathhouses for indigents, sick people, or rehabilitated prosti-
tutes. It was especially common for bathhouses to cater only to women because
it was prohibited for both sexes to use the bathhouse, and also because men
could more easily bathe in the streams and canals that were a common feature of
Mexico City and its outskirts well into the nineteenth century. The owner of the
house where the baths were installed could be a private individual or corporate
owner, and religious groups such as convents or orders of priests were especially
prominent. Often the locale and merced of water was rented to the person or
group that ran the bathhouse, with the same variety of lay and religious actors
operating the establishments.
40    chapter 3

Every bathhouse was maintained by a set of required jobs that included tending
the fire and the boiler for the hotwater baths, tending the fire for the temazcal, fill-
ing and emptying the placeres, carrying buckets of water to the temazcal, cleaning
the installations, and handling money. There was often a bathhouse manager who
oversaw the activities for the owner, and there was always at least one temazcalero
(sweatlodge worker) to carry out all the menial labor. The sex of the workers was
especially important, for it was inappropriate and outlawed for men to be in con-
tact with women bathing in the placeres, and especially in the temazcal. Archival
records give the impression that temazcaleros in the bathhouses of Mexico City
were often indigenous people recently arrived from small towns in the Valley of
Mexico or nearby who lived in the bathhouse and earned room and board along
with their wages. In the case that a bathhouse was run by a religious order or con-
vent, the work was performed by its members.
In Mexico City, bathing of all kinds became more frequent over the course
of the eighteenth century, especially among the poor. According to the city gov-
ernment records consulted by the viceroy Conde de Revillagigedo in 1793, there
were twelve bathhouses licensed in 1691 by royal decree, and in 1741 this number
was increased to twenty-four in order to serve the growing population.14 In 1741
Don Leandro Manuel de Gogochea received a license from the viceroy Conde de
Juanclara to establish a new bathhouse with a temazcal for women in his house on
the Calle de la Servatana, and then again in 1744 he was given another license to
use his water concession to open a bathhouse for women in his house on the Calle
de la Miserecordia.15 In 1743 Leandro Manuel de Coxenechea y Carreaga received
permission from the viceroy to open the Casa de Baños del Comercio at #22 Calle
del Coliseo Viejo, also only serving women. More licenses were awarded in 1750
for bathhouses that offered placeres—or bathtubs—along with temazcales.16
The expansion of the practice of bathing in the eighteenth century also spurred
the creation of bathhouses that were not licensed. In 1778, Sebastián Fabian and
Miguel Pedro, caciques of the indigenous barrio of San Hipolito (just northwest
of the Alameda), complained bitterly to the city government that Miguel Oballa
purchased a house in that neighborhood with the goal of establishing a bath-
house. The problem, they stated, was not the bathhouse in itself, but the fact that
Oballa lacked a merced of water and was therefore robbing the barrio’s water sys-
tem to supply his business.17 Temazcales operated on unoccupied lands by rivers
and canals, offering steambaths to those who used those bodies of water to bathe.
The increase in licensed and unlicensed bathhouses in Mexico City shows that
bathing acquired a greater importance in the eighteenth century among the poor,
who, according to the second Conde de Revillagigedo, were “the people that use
them most.”18
The upswing in bathing was due in part to the increasingly accepted idea that it
was an activity that should be promoted due to the health benefits it offered to both
individuals and to the population as a whole. While plagues and diseases always
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    41

caused fear and concern among rulers and ruled alike, it was during the eigh-
teenth century that the more encompassing category of “public health” came into
being in Mexico as an object of analysis and government intervention.19 Bathing
was a key practice of public health that quickly spread from the educated elite
through the popular masses. For example, when applying for a license to build a
bath and temazcal the owner of the property called “La Quemada” made it clear to
the police department that they were supporting bathing because it was “public,
and noted for its medicinal qualities.”20
The increasingly common assumption that bathing was good for the health of
the population arose from various roots. The temazcal was always viewed as thera-
peutic, and was used since before the conquest to remedy specific health prob-
lems. One of these uses was to help women purify themselves and recoup forces
after childbirth, a practice that remained strong throughout the colonial period,
as temazcal bathing was adopted into the institutional medicine practiced by doc-
tors and hospitals. In Triptio, Michoacán, the hospital run by the Augustine friars
utilized a temazcal in the 1540s, as did the Hospital Real de los Naturales in Mexico
City, which cared for indigenous people and also made use of the hot mineral
springs in Peñón de los Baños.21 The Hospital del Amor de Dios, founded around
1540, featured, by the eighteenth century, a temazcal and bathhouse in its building
on the Callejón del Amor de Dios. This temazcal provided therapy for patients,
but was also a business that provided income to its owners. When, in 1788, this
temazcal came under scrutiny by the city government, the overseer defended the
steambath as a normal and accepted feature of any bathhouse in the city: “they all
have what they call a Temazcal, which is looked upon as important medicine in
the Capital, following general custom.”22 This was the colonial temazcal, purged of
many of its indigenous religious and social meanings when it was adopted by the
Spanish-dominated colonial society, and reshaped more narrowly as therapeutic
and medicinal (see chapter 1). Another root of the idea that bathing was healthful
came from Europe, where bathing and water were long associated with health and
therapy, an idea that grew stronger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The health benefits of bathing were, however, a promise fraught with peril, for
bathhouses and temazcales were also known to be a setting for sinful encoun-
ters between men and women. The assumption was that these were either illegal
sexual liaisons between prostitutes and clients, or simply the customs of Indians
and poor mestizos that nevertheless offended God and the ruling class. In the
Spanish tradition, social bathing was considered particularly dangerous for the
honor of women, a guiding principle of gender present also in Latin America.23
Such transgressions did not occur only among the unruly plebe, however. In 1779
a lower cleric (racionero) working in the Cathedral of Morelia, Michoacán, was
punished for bringing his lover to the baths at the Cuincho hot springs managed
by the Franciscan order. A short time later the viceroy received a complaint from
the mother of two young women who were taken for a weeklong tryst to the same
42    chapter 3

bathhouse by two other clerics.24 Sex in the baths, by all accounts a rather common
occurrence, caused a moral clouding of the beneficial waters.
Swimming showed the same Janus-faced character as bathing: widely accepted
by the late colonial period as a healthy encounter with water, but still deeply sus-
pect for its social implications. In the lacustrine city swimming in rivers and canals
was a common social activity among the plebe, not easily distinguished from bath-
ing. Elites also enjoyed swimming, however. In 1814, Don Manuel Pevedilla asked
the Junta de Policía of Mexico City to award him a license for the swimming pool
at his country house, which was used by his friends and acquaintances to “have
fun.” The pool was four feet deep, measured about sixteen feet by thirty feet, and
was surrounded by walls on all sides. He assured the government that men and
women would not swim together in his pool and that he would maintain order, but
argued that it was the right of any citizen to have fun in his home. The government
agreed to provide this permit for the pool, because of the sound moral and politi-
cal character of Sr. Pevedilla, but also on the grounds that bathing in cold flowing
water afforded proven health benefits. Ramón Gutiérrez del Mazo, the political
chief of Mexico City who granted the permission, declared before the junta that
swimming was a beneficial activity supported by wise policies and education, but
that it was too often ignored or disdained in the heavily populated urban center.
In his view, swimming should, like bathing, be promoted by enlightened govern-
ment. The permit was granted under the agreement that men and women would
not share the water at the same time: not even boys and girls could “have fun”
together.25 The fears of disorder, and the moral strictures about immersion and
sharing water that those fears engendered, were centered on plebian bathing and
swimming, but extended even to the private spaces of elite houses. Residents of
New Spain learned to negotiate in their practices of swimming and bathing the
tense opposition between the health benefits and moral degradation caused by
these socioaquatic encounters, participating in this way in the disciplining process
that was Police.

T H E BA N D O O F 1 7 9 3

Together with improved administration of the mercedes of water and renovation

of infrastructure, the viceregal government responded to chronic water shortages
with a project to establish order in the use of public fountains and bathhouses. The
famous modernizing viceroy of New Spain, the Second Conde of Revillagigedo,
ordered a study made of the bathhouses, temazcales, and laundries of Mexico City,
to establish the bases for an edict, or Bando, that reformed and regulated those
establishments and the contacts that took place within them between people, and
between people and water. The ordinance was proclaimed on September 24, 1792,
and published in 1793. The Bando established rules to promote “public comfort,
decency and health,” part of a wider focus on “all the objects of policing in this
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    43

Capital.” Public bathhouses were commonplace and bathing was viewed by the
viceroy to be a “necessary” and indispensable practice that deserved his attention
over other matters of state. It was not the first time the government issued rules
for the bathhouses, but Revillagigedo complained that the government failed to
hold the private bath owners and administrators to “the few rules already pro-
nounced that favor good order and Public service.”26
The viceroy, an American-born criollo administrator whose father served as
viceroy of New Spain some forty years earlier, felt a deep commitment to colonial
society and to changing it for the better. Revillagigedo brought a spirit of ratio-
nal secular reform that was emblematic of the approach of the enlightenment
Bourbon government, and he was notorious for his efforts at fighting corruption
and enforcing the law. Similar in his governing style to Ladrón de Guevara, he
proceeded systematically and scientifically in designing the new rules for bath-
ing. First, the city sent architects and police officers (celadores de Policía) to visit
all the existing bathhouses and evaluate their physical state, as well as the bathing
practices that occurred within them. Based on these visits, the viceroy made an
evaluation of the cultural traditions of bathing in Mexico City, as well as associated
physical and infrastructural problems of bathhouses, before producing a long list
of criteria that bathers, bathhouse owners, and employees were required to fulfill.
The 1793 Bando obliged all formal bathing and washing establishments to be
licensed by the government, and established seventeen rules that baños, temazcales,
and lavaderos were required to comply with. The measures were aimed at promot-
ing “comfort, decency and public health” by stopping the “abuses, excesses and
disorders that until now have reigned in the bathhouses to the detriment of the
Public.” The temazcales were viewed with suspicion by the governing Spaniards
and criollos, and while the religious dimensions of their use were largely gone by
the beginning of the nineteenth century, some of their social and sexual aspects
remained. At a very basic level this was just a question of economy: the temazcal
required a good deal of fuel, effort, and time to heat, so men, women, and chil-
dren often used the temazcal together once it was heated. Certain temazcales were
also most likely sites of sexual encounters, as they had been in the precolonial
period, and the Revillagigedo government tried to eliminate heterosexual sex in
the bathhouses by “cutting it off at the root.” The neighborhood administrators
of Policía were charged with enforcing the 1793 decree. Decency, or “good order,”
was paramount, and the first rule of the Bando was that bathhouses could only
serve women or men, but never both. Unlike those earlier moments in the colonial
encounter when the Church sought to eradicate the entire practice of the temazcal,
the Bando of 1793 promoted this form of bathing while protecting a social and
moral order based on the honor of women and a notion of public health.
Other rules aimed to separate bathers and create privacy within the bathhouse
itself, a project that spatialized morality along the axes of caste and class. The
Bando decreed that individual bathing chambers should be divided into separate
44    chapter 3

rooms by unbroken walls, with no way to see bathers from the windows, or from
the doors, if they were to be left open. The doors should all have locks, with keys in
the possession of the bathhouse operator in case of emergency, as well as a straw
mat to cover the floor and to rest upon, a bench or chair, and shelf for a candle.
The Bando suggested that some, if not all, of the bathing chambers should have
extra luxuries: a bell pull to summon the temazcalero to add water to the bathtub;
hot and cold faucets to allow each bather to deliver all the water he or she should
desire, rather than having it poured bucket by bucket by the temazcalero; a space
for the bather’s servant that was separated from the bathtub, again to maintain
privacy. These rooms were for those who could afford them, while the poor used
bateas—washbasins—housed in a single undivided room, “as was the custom.”
The individuation, privacy, and class distinction of the bather was achieved by
these spatial and infrastructural regulations in the bathhouse.
Along with the placeres and bateas, many bathhouses installed temazcales as
well as lavanderos for washing clothes, and these too were objects of policing that
reinforced social distinctions. The temazcales were more popular among the poor
and indigenous, and by 1741 there were twenty-four of these steambaths licensed
by the government to operate in the city. Fifty years later, Revillagigedo’s Bando
allowed an unlimited number of bathhouses for bathing by immersion, but
insisted on maintaining the number of temazcales at twenty-four. In that interim,
many more unlicensed temazcales were set up next to canals and rivers that still
existed on the city’s fringes, serving the poor and indigenous people who used
them most. The Bando suggested that all temazcales be located on the outskirts of
the city “so that the poor people would have them closer at hand.” The bathhouses
of the city center, on the other hand, could focus on bathing by immersion, a prac-
tice that required the running water of the public water system. Lavanderos were
a series of washbasins in an open space and were used by poor women. Having
studied the water culture of Mexico City, the viceroy found it necessary to prohibit
these washerwomen from undressing and washing the clothes they were wearing,
a practice that was common at the public fountains.27 Finally, the bathhouses were
required to have toilets, with cesspools or connections to the city sewers in the
street that would carry off the human waste along with all the used water from the
placeres, temazcales, bateas, and lavanderos. Shit, an unremarkable feature of early
modern urban space, was recast as reprehensible.28
Police records about the enforcement of the Bando provide insight into bath-
ing practices, social mores, and class dynamics in Enlightenment Mexico City. For
example, in early 1793 José Molina, a neighbor of the “Padre Garrido” bathhouse,
on the Calle de San Miguel, heard a ruckus coming from that business.29 The neigh-
bor happened to be the local watchman (celador), and knew that it was up to local
police officials such as himself to uphold order and propriety in the city. The viceroy
just recently announced new rules for bathhouses that were meant to eradicate the
“disorder and disarray” that reigned in those establishments and to ensure orderly
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    45

bathing for the benefit of public health. José, the celador, was compelled to investi-
gate what seemed to be the sort of entrenched social bathing habits among the city’s
indigenous and poor that the new rules were meant to eradicate. The principal rule
of this new Bando was that bathhouses for women such as this one were off-limits
to men, so naturally José peeked through the door. He saw a large group of women
and four men having lunch and drinking pulque, an alcoholic beverage favored by
Indians. As if this was not enough of an affront to the civility of the public and the
will of the viceroy, one of the women was undressing while the men were present.
José dutifully reported this “disorder” to his superiors at the city police.
Witnesses were called to give testimony in the government offices. Standing
before the police tribunal, the temazcalero, a “tribute-giving Indian” from Chalco
named Lorenzo Francisco Antonio, identified himself and stated that because his
boss, the female bathhouse operator, was gone at the time, he gave permission
for the group to have lunch inside, but told them not to bathe until all the men
had left. He stepped down and the next witness—the temazcalero’s wife, a mestiza
woman from Mexico City named María Gertrudis González—was called to give
testimony. As she rose to give her deposition, Lorenzo spoke briefly and quietly to
María in Nahautl, with the Spanish police official listening attentively. María then
proceeded to explain to the government officials that the group was accompanying
a woman who recently gave birth (a parida) so that she could take the temazcal.
It was understood by everyone in the room that such a visit to the temazcal was a
common ritual in which relatives and friends participated, and was accompanied
by food and pulque. The wife of the temazcalero finished by declaring that it was
the husband of the parida who brought the buckets of water into the temazcal—not
at all an indecent encounter. Last to provide testimony was María Antonia López,
a Spanish woman who rented the building and operated the bathhouse. She placed
the blame for the incident on the Indian temazcalero, saying that she was called
away from her responsibilities because of a sick child, and that she did not give her
employee permission to allow men and women into the bathhouse together.
When all witnesses finished their statements, the police official overseeing
the depositions made a dramatic announcement. He had overheard Lorenzo
Francisco murmuring instructions in Nahuatl to María Gertrudis about what to
say to the tribunal, and he would lock the temazcalero up in jail for “seducing
and guiding” her. Later, when Don Bernadeo Bonavía y Zapata ruled on the case,
he found the prisoner Lorenzo Francisco guilty of the “grave excess” of allowing
men and women together in the bathhouse, and of allowing “scandalous abuses,
entirely prohibited.” He sentenced the temazcalero to eight days of hard labor on
public works projects, cautioning him that there would be no mercy if such a thing
happened again. The Spanish bathhouse operator, on the other hand, was simply
cautioned not to abandon her duties again. Lorenzo responded with the formulaic
utterance of the subaltern: “I hear and I will comply, but I won’t sign because I
don’t know how to write.”30
46    chapter 3

This courtroom drama tells us much about relations of inequality and power
that surrounded bathing in Mexico City in the late eighteenth century. To begin
with, while the Bando regulated bathtubs, temazcales, sinks, and clothes washing
tubs, this and most other cases of transgressions and prosecutions only dealt with
temazcales. The Bando reasserted earlier regulations that prohibited mixed-sex
bathing in the temazcales, but said little about bathing by immersion. One judge
explained in 1750 that the earlier rules were “provided by the Duke of the Conquest
because there were too many disorders in those temazcales,” and the regulation
of bathing in the 1790s continued to focus on steambaths.31 This shows that the
regulations were an effort to change the water culture of the poorer, more indig-
enous social classes. Placeres were used by relatively affluent Spanish, creole, or
mestizo people who could afford to conform to the moral standards and values
of Enlightenment officials, such as privacy. Bathing by immersion in tubs of hot
water was a relatively recent import to Mexico, and did not have the same deep
religious, social, and sexual dimensions associated with the temazcal. The 1793
Bando certainly prohibited mixed-sex use of the placeres, but it influenced bathing
by immersion in a more positive, rather than punitive, way through the archi-
tectural requirements it established. Clients who could pay for expensive placeres
were to be provided with privacy and comfort: a vision for how bathing should be
rather than an attack on what it should not be.
Bathing shows us how the class struggle between rulers and ruled was orga-
nized. Both the group that carried out the postpartum bathing ritual and viceroy’s
capillary police organization were motivated by concepts of cleanliness, decency,
and public health, but the concepts held quite different meanings for these differ-
ent people. This new definition of bathing proposed by the viceroy in the Bando of
1793 was clearly not shared by many of the clients of the bathhouses. There was an
abrupt social divide based on notions of class, race, ethnicity, honor, and decency,
and on access to one or the other form of bath: placer or temazcal. The placer was
a tradition with origins in Spain, not the Americas, and bathing by immersion
was imagined in the late eighteenth century as the more refined, European form.
The Bando aimed to refine the placer even further, individualizing and privatizing
the bathing experience. The poor and indigenous, on the other hand, conserved
practices of ritual temazcal bathing in groups: in the case presented above, for a
woman who just went through childbirth. This bath was a social ritual celebrat-
ing the birth of a child and the survival of the mother, who was accompanied by
family members and friends to support her in the care of the infant as well as in
the bath itself.
Police was an exercise of rule on the terrain of culture. It was not ignorance of
customs that drove the viceroy to outlaw them in the Bando, but rather knowledge
about them gained from careful study. The delegate of the Crown to rule New
Spain imposed a concept of the correct way to bathe that sought to change popular
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    47

bathing customs, obliging the mass of city residents who utilized public temazcales
to do so quietly, orderly, individually, and in a way that repressed sexual and social
dimensions in favor of emergent concepts of cleanliness, decency, and public
health. Washerwomen, cleaning their own clothes as well as the clothes of their
wealthier employers, were also singled out as a particular threat to the new order.
They were admonished for nudity while washing; they were castigated for washing
in the public fountains; they were accused of open defecation in the bathhouse.32
Cultural attitudes toward bathing do not derive in any automatic way from the
social position of an individual, and in some cases it was young indigenous women
who lodged complaints with the police that a man was attending to their temazcal.
Bruna Cisneros and her sister María, both indigenous women from Mexico City,
testified against José Anselmo Escobar, temazcalero in the bathhouse of the Calle
de las Moscas, for entering the temazcal to make steam by throwing water on the
hot stones and to pour buckets of water over the bathers. María declared that her
sister was deeply ashamed because the man saw her body, and it was this shame
and sense of honor that motivated her to report the breach of the law to Molina,
the local police officer. While they were at the bathhouse to take a shared temazcal,
by no means did these poor indigenous women feel comfortable with unknown
men seeing them naked or entering into the temazcal with them, which reflects the
limits of the sociality of bathing among subaltern folks in Mexico City. Although
the sense of honor and shame articulated by María was rooted in traditions that
went back well before the Enlightenment, it was also at the heart of a modern
sense of public decency and order expressed in the Bando and articulated by her
testimony and those of other subaltern actors.33
The records about policing the bathhouses in Mexico City shed light on both
the emergence of modern governance and on the effects of policing on the ways
people related to waters and to each other. The infractions to the Bando of 1793
judged by the regidores were brought to their attention by citizens who were local
agents of Police—the celadores. José Molina, who took the initiative of investigat-
ing the “Padre Garrido” bathhouse described above, was from the neighborhood.
The proclamation of the viceroy was enforced by the local agents of government
who introduced the careful gaze of Police into people’s neighborhoods, businesses,
homes, and baths. Another police officer, Onofre Ramírez, sent his wife of twenty-
five years to take a temazcal in a women’s bathhouse he suspected of having male
temazcaleros that mistreated the female clients. By her own account, Ramirez’ wife
was lucky to have escaped unharmed by the temazcalero, and remained fearful of
retribution for her testimony.34 Considering the risks, the commitment of both
husband and wife to uphold the law and police the culture of water is remarkable.
We can discern in these stories how an awareness of the rules and a consciousness
of the position of one’s self in relation to the rules were insinuated into everyday
relationships, even the most intimate ones.
48    chapter 3

C O N C LU SIO N S

Water scarcity and social heterogeneity threatened to burst the levees of colonial
order in the late eighteenth century. The city was imagined by its rulers to work
like a human body, with its interrelated organs and circulation of fluids, and so
government was seen to require the creation of infrastructure and the ordering of
space. Society, too, was expected to be orderly, and government in the late colo-
nial context was directed at managing the frictions between heterogeneous groups
defined by origin, status, and casta. In late colonial Mexico, policía was the word
given to this regulatory activity and institution by the viceregal government, a
meaning that shifted toward “security” as the nineteenth century progressed.35
A series of dictums issued by the Crown in the 1780s created institutions, codi-
fied policing, and heightened its importance to colonial administrators, especially
in Mexico City.36 Police encompassed the ordering of political economy and the
control of urban space through the building of circulatory infrastructure and the
management of wastes. It was, moreover, a moral project to manage populations
by reforming behaviors and cultural practices and eliminating vices.
Public health was a key arena in which governing officials sought to expand the
purview of policing. In the eighteenth century the health of people was considered
to be intimately connected with the environment, as it had been since Hippocrates
penned Airs, Waters and Places.37 From this perspective, odorous airs, or miasmas,
were held to be vectors of disease, and cold and heat were also blamed for health
problems.38 The watery urban environment of Mexico City was thought to produce
these smells and airs, so public health measures tried to improve circulation of
these substances and keep waste out of them. Good health depended on clean,
constantly circulating water, and the government did what it could to keep the
water in the city’s pipes and canals safe from the polluting contact with humans
and animals, and to keep it apart from the compromised waters of the lake and the
rivers. It was this conceptual link between environment and health that gave rise to
the thriving fields of climatology and mineral springs medicine in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.39
Water management was framed in terms of the health of the entire undifferen-
tiated public. However, the issue of provisioning specific different groups of people
in the city with liquid was never far from the surface, and much of the archival
record reflects contention over the resource. Water was crucial, of course, to the
livelihoods of peasants who depended on the lakes and irrigation systems for food.
But water was also fundamental to the survival of the swelling urban populations
of the eighteenth century. When urban water sources dwindled, or became con-
taminated, unrest followed. There never seemed to be enough water in the public
infrastructure, especially for the expanding, peripheral neighborhoods of poor
recent immigrants to the city, and so the policing of water was aimed at ensuring
supply and access to the liquid for heterogeneous groups of poor and marginal
 Policing Waters and Baths in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City    49

people. Water management was fraught with peril, but its positive promise could
be realized by building infrastructure and shaping ideas and actions.
A major focus of policing in Enlightenment Mexico City was the practices
and infrastructures of bathing. After the sixteenth century during which bath-
ing was viewed with suspicion, it regained by the eighteenth century a privileged
place among civilized customs due in part to the success of the Spanish rulers in
reshaping the practice. The temazcal had been largely purged of its indigenous
religious and sexual associations and was by that time used by all social groups
for cleanliness and health. Bathing by immersion was also on the upswing, influ-
enced by similar shifts in Europe and North America and the encouragement of
Enlightenment governments. The sciences of medicine and chemistry were grow-
ing quickly in the service of public health, and they focused on water and the
positive improvements that could be achieved through its management.40 Despite
these changes, bathing retained worrisome moral and civic dangers. It cleaned and
healed, but was also still a setting for sexual and social encounters that the govern-
ment, as always, strived to prevent. Bodies were separated; men and women kept
apart. Bathing by immersion was increasingly individualized and bathing in the
temazcal—always a group activity—was segregated by gender.
While the contours of this overall shift in water culture are clear, a close look
at the archives shows us that would be a mistake to award too much coherence, or
effectiveness, to the project of Police. Far from a steamroller of spiritual history that
functionalized people to the demands of bourgeois society, Police in Mexico City
was a series of declarations, actions, and decisions, not always interconnected, that
percolated unevenly through the urban underclass. The institutions of Police were
similarly incomplete, with partial coverage and selective application. What polic-
ing does show is how the daily frictions between rulers and ruled were organized
along lines of race, class, sex, and ethnicity, and how universalizing concepts such
as “nation,” “public,” and “citizen” were deployed by the government and reworked
with differing content by people according to their position within specific fields of
power. Enlightenment water governance was an incomplete and fragmented proj-
ect that would nonetheless gain strength over the following two centuries.
 4

Enlightenment Science of
Mineral Springs

Reforming elites in Enlightenment Mexico City did what they could to clean up
the disorder they perceived around them. Policing was their response—the ratio-
nal management of populations and resources to ensure that both prospered.
Studies were carried out to provide information useful for management of the
varied castes and classes in the urban center, and for channeling waters more
efficiently through infrastructures to private buildings and public fountains. The
objects of reform were complex systems that melded resources, infrastructures,
and human bodies, ideas, and practices; washing and bathing in particular were
subject to scrutiny as cleanliness came to the fore as a pillar of public health and
social order. Partly because of this complexity, the policing of waters and baths was
haphazardly and selectively enacted.
The promise of bathing was not only moral and physical purity, however. For
millennia waters were considered regenerative, therapeutic, and medicinal, and it
is hard to overestimate the importance waters held for ideas about health in the
ages before antibiotics and surgery. Waters were thought to both cure illnesses
and prevent them. There were many categories of waters, each defined by a char-
acteristic: salty, iron, soda, hot, warm, etc. Certain kinds of waters balanced the
body’s humors in certain ways; others were prescribed for skin problems, venereal
disease, kidney stones, even madness. Waters were applied in an empirical and
experimental way, based in the traditions passed down by healers and from the
texts of antiquity.
In this chapter I continue the discussion of enlightened bathing by turning to
the ways that the diversity of Mexico’s mineral spring waters were studied, val-
ued, and used during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is a

50
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    51

story of the growth of scientific knowledge about chemistry, medicine, and related
topics such as botany and human physiology, and the importance of springs in
the development and application of this knowledge. Historians have shown that
northern European mineral and hot springs were especially important sites for
growth of science and medicine in the modern period, and this is also true for New
Spain, what is today Mexico. A look at the colonial realm of the Americas, how-
ever, reveals social dimensions of water cultures that are not commonly portrayed
in the literature concerning European hot springs, specifically issues of race, class,
access, and power.
There is also something to be learned from American mineral springs about
the particular development of science in those longitudes. Colonial science during
the Enlightenment grappled with reconciling universal humanism and a search
for the exotic and incommensurable. In other words, hot springs and the humans
who used them (like plants, animals, and the rest of the natural world) were seen
to fit into global classificatory schemes, but inherited European notions that the
Americas were fundamentally different lingered. Expeditions were mounted to
identify this American exceptionalism and incorporate it into the expanding clas-
sification systems of modern science. Scientists traveled to the far corners of New
Spain in search of hot springs and measured their temperature, smell, taste, color,
density, and chemical composition. These springs were usually already some-
what developed by local users, and local bathing and drinking customs were also
chronicled by scientists interested in the medical applications of the waters and the
possibility of developing them into spas like those that were become increasingly
fashionable across Europe.
A close look at the Enlightenment science of waters reveals a key ontological
difference from today’s scientific understanding of them. Waters acted; they were
medicinal, with qualities described at the time as “virtues.” Most people now think
of water as an inert, uniform liquid that is controlled and used by people to grow
food or flowers and wash dishes, cars, or bodies. Scientists today largely share
those ideas, although they recognize that the water molecule is polar, and thus can
dissolve many substances, and that as a liquid it can erode solids. In the eighteenth
century, however, different waters were seen to have other kinds of effects, and to
have them on human bodies. Long before the recent appreciation for “vibrant mat-
ter” and nonhuman “actants” in anthropology, Enlightenment science strove to
understand the powers of water, and how it formed assemblages with bodies and
cultures that came together in human health.1

T H E V I RT U E S O F WAT E R S

From the early days of the colony until the Independence struggles, the Crown
periodically carried out surveys and censuses of its territories and populations,
both in Iberia and the Americas, for use in writing descriptive geographies called
52    chapter 4

Relaciones Geográficas.2 A review of these surveys provides an overview of how,

as the centuries progressed, the topic of mineral waters grew in importance, and
also how the cause for that interest changed. At first mineral springs were impor-
tant as sources of sodium chloride—table salt. Throughout Mesoamerica mineral
waters were used for the production of salt, a crucial complement to the largely
vegetable-based, sodium-scarce indigenous diet. Ixtapan de la Sal, a hot spring
town in today’s Mexico State, was famed in the Aztec empire as the source of clean,
white salt that circulated as a tribute good. Tequesquite, a naturally occurring com-
bination of sodium chloride and sodium bicarbonate that forms as encrustations
on the soil, was also crucial for the diet and economy, and was used in its natural
form for cooking and also processed to create sodium chloride. Inhabitants of the
Valley of Mexico continued to produce salt from encrustations on the shores of
Lake Texcoco until the early twentieth century.3 Salt was used for industry as well,
such as the curing of meat and, after the arrival of the Spaniards, the refining of
silver. So central was salt to the silver industry that in 1580 the Crown created a
royal monopoly over its production and commerce, and while salt mines eventu-
ally provided the greatest supply, in the early years of the colony salty lake and
spring waters were a key source of that mineral.4
The waters of the realm were valued for their “virtues”: for their characteristics
and efficacy in the world. In 1554, for example, the Crown asked local govern-
ments in Mexico to identify “big lakes or notable springs whose waters have some
particular virtue” or usefulness due to some essential characteristic of that water.
These virtues and their agency were not human, and “virtue” does not refer to the
moral principles or forms of reasoning that philosophers in the Western tradition
have long debated. Rather, virtues were qualities of the waters identified by their
material effects on other bodies, human and nonhuman, and grouped by those
effects and their assumed underlying causes. As time passed, the virtues of waters
were increasingly defined in terms of therapy and medicine, and the long medical
tradition coming down from antiquity through the Arabs identified categories of
waters by their effects on human bodies, such as aiding in rheumatism, healing
skin disease, or dissolving kidney stones.
While bathing was largely frowned upon during the sixteenth century, its
medical applications grew to be accepted by 1600. A survey questionnaire from
1604, for example, asked that local government officials provide information about
“medicinal springs or baths.”5 During the eighteenth century interest in medici-
nal waters flourished, and the refinement of the categories to describe the variety
of those waters is reflected by the 1777 questionnaire, which sought information
concerning “hot waters, salty waters, bituminous waters, and those waters useful
for certain illnesses, as well as the temperature of the waters and their respective
bitterness, bituminous flavor or saltiness.”6 By 1812 this interest blossomed into
an entire field of questions in the census questionnaire (article 11) concerning
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    53

“mineral waters and baths.” Respondents were instructed to provide information

about the waters themselves, as well as the practices of the people who made use
of the waters, and the infrastructure that existed to support the people who visited
those waters.7 Underlying this inquiry into the utility of waters was the idea that
waters were efficacious, agential, “virtuous.”
The changes over time in the questions posed by the government about min-
eral waters reflect developments in science, medicine, and the business of bathing.
Historians suggest that in the eighteenth century intellectuals began to approach
waters and their medicinal qualities in a new way. Departing from the Hippocratic
and Galenic tradition that was empirical and experimental, scholars working in
the emerging scientific paradigm developed a theoretical and systemic approach
to understanding the diversity of waters and their particular effects on human
organisms and diseases. The results of these investigations into waters and bod-
ies were applied to a growing model of the relations among substances in the
­universe—chemistry—and scholars distilled, processed, and analyzed the con-
tents of mineral springs to identify their components, locate them in relation to
other substances, and discern their effects on the human body.8
Mineral springs chemistry had great implications for medicine. Doctors brought
new information about the substances in plants and waters to bear on existing
schemes for understanding disease and well-being such as temperature, climate,
and humors. In 1788 Mexican doctor Juan Manuel Venegas dedicated a section of
his Compendio de la Medicina to water treatments, in which he discussed the effects
of different temperatures and kinds of waters and different techniques of bathing.
The hot mineral waters of Mexico were grouped into categories depending on their
principal substance—ferrous, sulfurous, calceous, acidic, and nitrous—each with its
applications to particular conditions. He listed dozens of hot springs in New Spain
that had already been analyzed for the purpose of promoting medicinal uses. In
addition to these hot mineral waters, the doctor described the efficacy of bathing in
“common water” for certain conditions, which reveals both the conceptual existence
of homogeneous modern water, and that it was at that time simply one kind of water
among many. Doctors also elaborated a range of physical applications of waters to
bodies—techniques of bathing that corresponded to particular waters or ailments.
Half-body baths from the stomach down, or semicupios, were recommended for
colic, kidney stone pain, and inflammations in the belly. Foot-baths were prescribed
for headaches, facial paralysis, sideaches, and hemorrhoids. Temazcales were useful
for sterility in women, paralysis, and “coldness” in the body. These applications were
believed to compensate for an excess of some condition in the body (heat, cold,
humidity, dryness, viscosity) with an opposing quality (temperature, chemical, area
of application) of the water or its application. But while medicine and chemistry
developed a new scientific paradigm for understanding waters, their heterogeneity
and classificatory order was rooted conceptually in their virtues.
54    chapter 4

E X P E D I T IO N S

Most of what we know about the development of science occurred in northern

and western Europe, and this is especially true of the science of waters. Although
less has been written about colonial science, intellectuals in the New World were
keenly aware of the latest advances and actively participated in these discussions.9
Expeditions mounted in Iberoamerica in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries sought new plants, animals, mines and resources, new routes, and unseen
human cultural diversity. Occasionally these expeditions were directed to study-
ing hot springs, and such waters were always mentioned if encountered en route.
Colonial space served as a special sort of laboratory, where scientists mounted
expeditions to search for the exotic, unusual, and exceptional, and to measure,
analyze, and classify these novelties using new methods. The search for the exotic
was an older project that lingered on after the paradigm shift to experiment. In
1591, for example, Juan de Cárdenas revealed to readers the “marvelous secrets
of the Indies,” recounting tales of petrifying waters that caused leaves and other
objects to develop a stony, mineral surface. As we shall see, Enlightenment scien-
tists brought new techniques of measurement and description to bear on similarly
exceptional natural and human phenomena in the hot springs of New Spain.
Expeditions were controlled by the church and Crown until the early nineteenth
century, when imperial power waned and individuals from other countries were
granted permission to carry out studies of the Americas. Around 1770 the arch-
bishop of Mexico, Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, sent Fray Pablo de la Purísima
Concepción Beaumont to study the hot springs of San Bartolomé, near the city
of Querétaro. The springs had been used since at least the 1500s by locals to relax
and feel better, and by the late eighteenth century were managed by the Hippolyte
religious order. In 1757 a priest from Querétaro cured his arthritis by bathing in
the waters, which spread the fame of the hot springs among the urban elite. With
the increasingly popularity of hot springs among bathers, scientists, doctors, and
government officials throughout the 1700s, the church sought to develop San
Bartolomé hot springs into a hospital and bathhouse. Beaumont had a degree from
a university in Paris, and was well acquainted with the “particular treatises” con-
cerning mineral springs in Europe and their curative effects.10 His 1772 study of San
Bartolomé was the scientific justification for plans to build baths and a hospital for
indigenous people and to establish professional medicine at the site.
Beaumont sought to replicate the European model of the spa in rural Mexico.
But despite this universal application of medicine and water science, he was well
attuned to the specificity of both the springs and their users, for the attractiveness
of San Bartolomé resided in its unique virtues. His analysis of the water begins
with simple evaluations of its smell and taste: a light sulfur odor and a sharp taste
of iron. Reduced by boiling, the water had an effervescent quality, and the solid
residues burned readily when put to the flame. Confirming that the distilled water
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    55

was “crystalline” and pure, he continued to process the residual solids with a vari-
ety of techniques, deducing finally that the waters were rich in “sulphuric, alkaline,
fixed salts.”11 According to Beaumont, this combination promised to “dissolve thick
humors” (the alkali) and serve as a sedative and balm for skin disease, respira-
tory problems, and paralysis (the sulfur). He prescribed the springs for treating
arthritis, rheumatism, and gout, and described a set of bathing practices that must
be followed.12 The patient should take two baths a day of fifteen to thirty minutes,
one at 10 a.m. and one at 5 p.m., and after each should be wrapped in clothes to
promote profuse sweating.13 Drinking the warm water would also induce sweat-
ing, which was considered the key to achieving results. For the treatment of renal
or pulmonary problems, patients should take semicupios (half-baths) from the
waist down. Other maladies required showers—water poured from a considerable
height from a bowl.14
Beaumont also carried out a social study of the springs and their uses. The
waters were used for all purposes by the locals. Of course they bathed in them, but
having no other source they also drank only mineral spring water and suffered no
obvious deleterious results as far as Beaumont could tell. Once the water left the
baths, it irrigated fields of grain and vegetables, also with no negative effects on
plants other than fruit trees, which did not grow in the area. The earth around the
springs was saturated with minerals, and the Indians use it as a soap they called
Xaboxay to wash their clothes in the mineral waters.15 The spring itself was fenced
off, and the waters were conducted from the source to a large pool through ceramic
pipes. Beaumont considered this a wise design, for it prevented the popular prac-
tice of cooking chickens and corn in them, or using them to scald and pluck butch-
ered animals. It also conserved the heat, and with it, many of the health benefits
of the water. The priest viewed with distrust the practice of local men and women
to bathe “one in front of the other, with their unclothed flesh exposed to the four
winds,” but recognized that because nudity “was almost a custom in these lands”
that “maybe there is no spiritual danger.”16 Nevertheless, “some women who are
not Indians take the shameful liberty of bathing in public,” a practice Beaumont
was eager to put an end to. He suggested that two pools be maintained, so as to
separate the sexes and maintain decency and order.
The double standard by which Beaumont evaluates the morality of indigenous
and nonindigenous bathers reflects an unresolved tension in Beaumont’s treatise
between his analysis of the universal benefits of hot springs bathing for humans
and his proto-racial theory of the distinctiveness of different groups of bathers. The
Indians of the region, he said, “almost lived in the San Bartolomé hot springs, bath-
ing there at all hours of the day and night.”17 This was natural, he reasoned, for their
work in the fields gave them an excess of cold and humidity in their bodies, and the
hot springs were the remedy at hand. They “live always naked,” which made their
skin less delicate and more resistant to the heat of the water. But beyond the cultural
differences, Beaumont believed that Indian bodies had a particular physiological
56    chapter 4

and chemical composition which responded especially well to these waters. Their
bodies, he wrote, were “very oily, their sweat is thick, which is why they do not get
gray hair until very old, and, as I have observed in the Real Hospital de Naturales in
Mexico, their bones are full of Sulphur.”18 He maintained that the bones of Indians
were “spongy, filled with lots of oily marrow, and sulphurous,” which allowed them
to bathe at length in the San Bartolomé hot springs and extract great benefits from
it. Just as different ailments responded to a water in different ways, so too did dif-
ferent bodies. This understanding of bodily heterogeneity and variable “virtue”
jostles alongside Beaumont’s framing of the study as an effort to serve a universal
“public good”—the health of the population.19
This tension between the heterogeneous and homogeneous was at the center of
many efforts to understand the world from the emergent scientific perspective in
the Enlightenment. Antoine Lavoisier, who identified a number of elements and
contributed to the elaboration of the periodic table of elements, was particularly
influential among intellectuals in Spain and Mexico. Even before the publication
of his major work in 1789, the idea gained traction that water was a pure substance
composed of two hydrogen and one oxygen, and that dissolved into it were other
substances that provided all the waters of the world their particular properties.
Earlier descriptions of diverse waters based on geography, temperature, astrology,
and supernatural forces were replaced with a Linnean array of categories based
on the principal impurities found in water: iron, sulfur, carbonate (soda), salt, etc.
As Jamie Linton (2010) summarizes it, this was the period during which “waters”
became “water,” but the creation of the singular did not eradicate the existence of
the plural, and hot springs waters continued to be understood in terms of their
particular yet variable virtues.
The system of intendancies—regional jurisdictions—that was established in
Mexico by the reforming Bourbon government in its Ordenanza of 1786 obliged
regional governors to tour their regions and collect scientific information con-
cerning natural history.20 This information was expected to help the governors
to carry out their duties in the area of Police, and to marshal the resources of the
colonies for political and economic development. In March of 1789, the governor
of the Intendencia of Valladolid (today Michoacán), Juan Antonio de Riaño, was
surveying his territory together with a group of German engineers, in the hope of
developing mining resources. While exploring the Jorullo Volcano in Michoacán,
they stumbled across a ravine on the flanks of the mountain where there were
“various hot springs used as a bath by sick people.”21 Riaño expressed concern that
there were no scientific analyses of the waters, nor doctors to oversee their use
by locals. “It turns out,” he reported, “that most of the time people bathe in those
waters who have diseases that are of such a nature that they do not receive any
cure, but rather considerable harm.”22 He collected samples of the water with the
idea that scientific study by colleagues in Mexico City would promote the develop-
ment of a medical spa business in the Jorullo hot springs. These brief experimental
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    57

forays of institutional science had little effect on local water cultures, and peo-
ple continued to use hot springs in accordance with their inherited customs.
Nevertheless, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, the struggle over ideas and
access evidenced in Jorullo defines much of the history of Mexican hot springs
from the Enlightenment onward.
With both scientific and economic goals in mind, the Crown financed a series
of expeditions in the Americas that collected information about natural resources
such as plants, waters, and minerals in order to develop their medicinal uses. Hot
mineral springs received special attention because all three of these aspects could
be studied at the same: the waters, their mineral content, and the plants that grew
around them. At the same time, a series of laical scientific institutions were created
in Mexico: the Royal Academy of San Carlos (1781), the Royal Botanical Garden
(1788), and the Royal Mining School (1792). The growth and institutionalization
of a scientific community of pharmacists and doctors, and the lively discussion of
the ideas of Linnaeus and Lavoisier that ensued, helped motivate expeditions to
collect samples of plants and mineral waters.
The results of these expeditions, as well as other scientific news, were pub-
lished in the Gazeta de México, a journal sponsored by King Carlos III and edited
by Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros. Upon receiving this commission, de Zúñiga y
Ontiveros himself created a questionnaire that was distributed by the viceroy to
local officials of New Spain. Among other things, the questionnaire asked for
information about “health baths.”23 Perhaps prompted by this questionnaire, on
October 22, 1784, Joséph Ignacio Bartolache and Miguel Fernández of the Real
Tribunal del Protomedicato traveled eight miles north of Mexico City to examine
the Santa Cecilia springs. After bathing, drinking, and examining the waters they
found them to “promote and increase urine, cure indigestions, and dissipate ‘hypo-
chondriacal gases’.”24
The hot springs of the region of Valladolid, what is today Michoacán, were
of particular interest to these scientific expeditions. In May 1790 a large group
including scientists from Mexico’s Royal Botanical Garden (Real Jardín Botánico),
illustrators, servants, and Indians left Mexico City leading a mule train laden down
with gear such as compasses, thermometers, glassware, and chemicals. This, the
third salida of the Royal Botanical Expedition, had an itinerary that included the
provinces of Michoacán and Sonora to the west and north, and the task of record-
ing information about the geography, botany, and other resources of these regions.
The group reached the capital of Valladolid (now Morelia) in August and was
received warmly by Governor Riaño and the captain of the royal troops, Joséph
Bernardo de Fonserrada. As we have seen, Riaño was a naturalist with an inter-
est in analyzing hot spring waters and identifying their medicinal properties and
applications. In the morning he escorted the group and their retinue on a field
trip to the nearby hot spring of Cuincho, located on a hacienda owned by the
Augustine religious order two and a half miles northwest of Valladolid. The group
58    chapter 4

inspected the modest bathhouse, with its two rooms, each housing a large tub, and
looked over the pipe that brought the hot water from the spring to the bathhouse,
as well as another nearby spring that issued cold water. The officials explained the
different qualities and uses of the waters to the visiting scientists.25
Then the scientists got to work analyzing the waters. They examined the
springs, as well as the land and plants around the springs, and took measurements.
They water was hot—24 degrees on the Reaumur thermometer (an alcohol-based
instrument that divided the range between freezing and boiling into 80 degrees)—
and it had the weight of distilled water when measured by Beaumé’s areometer (a
hydrometer used for determining the specific gravity of liquids that were lighter
than water). They also looked at, touched, tasted, and smelled the water, finding it
to be odorless and colorless, with a flavor of acid. To determine the mineral con-
tents of the water the scientists stirred lime (probably CaO: calcium oxide) into
two liters of the water, which resulted in a precipitate of twenty-three grains of car-
bonic acid, indicating that there was carbon dioxide (CO2) mixed into the water
(H2O).26 Other reactants produced no precipitates, and so the group extracted the
neutral salts by boiling the water and put these aside for analysis back in Mexico
City by the director of the Royal Botanical Garden, Vicente Cervantes. They also
collected plant specimens around the springs, ordering that information into
Linnean categories.
According to the scientists and their guides, the local people frequented the
bathhouse to enjoy the “delicias” of the hot water and to treat ailments. This dual
function shows that the efforts by church and state discussed in chapters 2 and 3
to reshape bathing as a completely therapeutic, health-oriented practice were not
entirely successful. The scientists did not comment on the moral or cultural dimen-
sions of bathing for pleasure, which we have seen in the case of Cuincho to have
been recently tinged with sexual scandal involving young women and church offi-
cials. Instead, they stuck to their chemistry experiments and had quite a lot to say
about the virtues of the waters—their medicinal qualities and therapeutic uses. The
locals had gotten it wrong, the scientists wrote, mistaking the accumulations of
tequesquite (mostly table salt and bicarbonate of soda) on the walls of the bathhouse
for “nitro,” a category of explosive nitrogen-based substances. “Everyone lived with
the knowledge that there was nitro in the water, which is a very strange substance to
be found in mineral waters,” they commented.27 Under this assumption, and often
with the recommendation of a doctor, people bathed in this water with the goal of
“tempering the heat in their blood,” a condition defined in terms of humoral theo-
ries. The scientists declared this faulty analysis and treatment to have led to a failure
to cure health problems, and indicated that instead of bathing in it to temper hot
blood, people should instead drink it to aid an array of maladies: congested humors,
indigestion-producing belches reeking of eggs, “putrid scurvy,” and chills.
The chemistry done by these scientists confronted established ideas about the
composition of the waters and has been called “the earliest publication found
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    59

yet concerning Lavoisierian chemistry in New Spain,” but their understanding

of medicine still did not stray far from the climatological and humoral orienta-
tion inherited from the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs.28 Subsequent studies of min-
eral springs and their medicinal applications sought more systematic coherence
between the modern chemistry employed in testing the waters, and the physi-
ological and chemical understanding of ailments and cures. In 1795 Antonio de
Cal, the representative in Puebla for the Royal Botanical Garden and a graduate
of its classes on botany, carried out a very similar study of the waters of Tehuacán,
which had been used for its therapeutic virtues since the 1600s. And by 1797, in an
article in the Gazeta discussing the hot springs of Xochitepec, the nomenclature of
the new science of chemistry was deployed in the analysis of the spring waters, in
the diagnosis of the ailments, and in the explanation for the efficacy of the waters
and their mineral contents in alleviating the ailments.29
The old ontological assumption that waters had “virtues” survived the emer-
gence of chemistry relatively intact and was even strengthened in some ways. The
idea that waters were agential, and that this agency could be described in terms of
the effects waters had on other bodies, underwrote the idea that waters contained
some chemical substance that could be separated out and utilized to treat some
similarly chemical problem in the human body. This concept was also at work in
the emerging botanical science practiced in the Royal Garden, which was aimed
at discovering and utilizing the useful ingredients in plants. The science of waters
practiced in Mexico at the end of the eighteenth century thus marks the transition
from the experimental, empirical methods of trial and error central to Galenic
medicine, to the theoretical and systemic approach ushered in by Lavoisier. This
was a fundamentally new way of understanding water as a universal element con-
taining diverse mineral contaminants, as perceived and measured with increas-
ingly precise techniques. But the scientific view subsumed, rather than abolished,
the view that waters were multiple and heterogeneous substances whose virtues
derived from their environment. Despite the paradigm shift, then, intellectuals did
not relinquish the ontological assumption that waters were virtuous.

P E Ñ Ó N D E L O S BA Ñ O S

Peñón de los Baños is the name of the small extinct volcanic hill that today lies a
few kilometers east of the Zocalo of Mexico City, next to the Benito Juárez interna-
tional airport. Five hundred years ago, at the moment of contact with Europeans, it
was an island in Lake Texcoco, controlled by Aztec emperors and used for hunting.
During the colonial period it was an especially important site for the reconfigu-
ration of knowledge about hot springs in New Spain. But more importantly, the
history of Peñón in the late eighteenth century reveals how different bathing prac-
tices and ontologies of water came together to structure access to the springs. As
government reformers and entrepreneurs increasingly set their sights on springs
60    chapter 4

during the Bourbon era, hot springs became sites of struggle between customary
bathing practices and new businesses, between rich and poor, and between forms
of knowledge about waters. A long, simmering conflict emerged between wealthy
clients drawn to the new business of leisure bathing that emerged at that time, and
the mass of people who had long used the springs for therapeutic ends.
Peñón de los Baños is one of the best-known hot springs in the history of Mexico,
but there is no record that its waters were used for bathing before the Spaniards
arrived. The island itself was awarded by the Crown to the conquistador Diego de
Ordaz in 1539, and by 1554 there was already a “fine vaulted building . . . a health bath
for sick people” who used the waters despite the general distrust the Spaniards had
for bathing at that time.30 Among the users was Fray Alonso Urbaño, a Franciscan
monk whose use of the baths to cure his crippled feet and hands prompted a visit in
June of 1585 from officials of his order who were worried about immorality among
their brethren in the New World.31 Because his bathing had medical purposes and
was backed up with scholarly reasoning (he was described as a “learned and prin-
cipled” man) he received no sanction. And, as bathing became more accepted by
the end of the sixteenth century, the Peñón bathhouse was increasingly frequented
by people who were not sick.32 Despite popular use for pleasure, members of the
Spanish religious and political elite continued to justify bathing in the waters of
Peñón principally as a medical practice undergirded by Galenic concepts of health.
In 1614 Hernando de Deza, inheritor of the bathhouse and spring, turned the facil-
ities into a trust, the property and proceeds from which to be given over to an
orphanage.33 De Deza also commanded that the trust pay for a priest to offer mass
in the chapel at the bathhouse complex every day, as well as two “black slaves”
to shuttle clients back and forth from Mexico City across Lake Texcoco in canoe.
These stipulations were not observed by the descendants of de Deza, who aban-
doned the bathhouse to disrepair amid legal battles over ownership.
In the eighteenth century the practice of bathing in mineral waters became
more widespread and extended through newly emerging social groups, and its
purposes and justifications diversified. Peñón, abandoned amid legal battles
among the heirs of de Deza over ownership, attracted increasing attention by the
illustrious, including doctors, scientists, and officials of the government of Mexico
City. In 1755 Antonio Villaseñor y Sánchez wrote that “the owners keep it in a state
of neglect and great discomfort, even though the usefulness of its waters are well-
known.”34 The doctor Joséph Dumont, newly arrived to Mexico City in 1740, made
his first stop the springs at Peñón de los Baños. Medical and chemical research on
mineral springs was flourishing in Europe at that time, and doctors often estab-
lished their practices in a spa town. Dumont immediately located Peñón as a local
curing water source, and influenced by the European example he set to examining
the waters of Peñón and prescribing them to his patients.
Many people used the springs to treat their ailments, but this use grew in the
mid-eighteenth century, backed by a surge in interest among scientists. In 1752
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    61

Dumont and his colleague Nicolás de Torres were commissioned by the Real
Protomedicato to write a study of the waters of Peñón that would explain their
“qualities, virtues and uses” with an eye to rehabilitating the abandoned installa-
tions for use by a growing bourgeois clientele. They couched the study in religious,
biblical terms, a requirement for any scholarly production in a Hispanic world
that was deeply skittish about science and secularism in the context of religious
conflicts that mapped onto geopolitical struggles in Europe. Dumont argued for
the healing properties of mineral waters using references to the Pool of Bethesda
(mentioned in the biblical books of Kings and Isaiah, as well as the Gospel of
John) which was renowned for its curing properties. He then moved to a scien-
tific discourse, citing secular authors and texts. Following the climatological ideas
of Hippocrates’s Airs, Waters and Places, he argued that all landscapes produce
certain health problems but also provide the elements for their treatment. The
humidity of Mexico City, with its lakes and rainfall, caused rheumatism, sciatica,
and gout, and God saw fit to provide the waters of Peñón to cure these ailments.
Friedrich Hoffman’s idea that the body was a hydraulic machine that could be
influenced by baths and mineral springs was particularly important to Dumont,
but hovered in a strange tension with the mysticism of his biblical references.
Dumont resolved the contradiction between religious and scientific positions
by explaining that the healing dynamics of mineral waters on human bodies were
designed by God: “[the waters] are a natural pharmacy . . . put there by the pow-
erful, wise and liberal hand of the Divine Architect.”35 Reaching beyond previ-
ous prescriptions and biblical references to bathing in mineral waters, Dumont
followed his colleagues in Europe by proposing drinking the waters. The curing
properties of the waters of Peñón were “acclaimed by the People,” Dumont states,
but he explained how they work by using the science of chemistry, and providing
information about how best to use them. For his part, Nicolás de Torres founded
his arguments even more explicitly on chemistry, drawing upon Linnean-style
classification schemes for mineral waters based on their “active principles,” which
produce 479,001,070 possible combinations and thus kinds of waters. He also
insisted that clients only use the waters under the care of a professional doctor.
Torres and Dumont were part of a government commission charged with devel-
oping the facilities at Peñón to receive and treat an expanding clientele of more
wealthy citizens, which, under the influence of European ideas and practices, had
a newfound interest in hot springs bathing and the money to pay for it. The inheri-
tors of the original bathhouse were embroiled in litigation over who would control
the property and the earnings it generated, and this compelled the government
to step in. Along with Torres and Dumont, two architects, a judge, and a scribe
made up the party that visited the hot springs in 1752. The facilities had not been
renovated since the creation of the De Deza trust in 1614. There was a large bath-
house with three four-room apartments circling a patio, each with a large tub room,
and rooms for sleeping. The baths had acquired names and personalities over the
62    chapter 4

centuries—Santa Teresa, el Colorado, la Marquesa—but the buildings were a com-

plete shambles, with crumbling roofs and walls and uneven dirt floors. A family
had at some point settled in one of these buildings and looked after the installa-
tions. The commission found the baths to be worth very little and unlikely to attract
customers, both because of the ruinous state of the buildings and because there was
no transportation from Mexico City: the canoes and slaves stipulated by the 1614
charter that created the bathhouse trust never materialized. Backed by the Informes
of the experts, the royal government forced the transfer of ownership of the bath-
house from the De Deza family to Carlos José Dueñas Pacheco, through the mech-
anism of an auction that only Dueñas attended. The bathhouse was rebuilt with
more space for visitors, and the works were finished in 1765.
Despite the claims of the government and the businessmen who took over
the baths, Peñón did indeed attract visitors in its decrepit state and had done so
for centuries. These poor people brought their own concepts of curing and were
unlikely to afford the cost of a doctor and a new, renovated bathhouse. They
appear only as shadows in the archive, as absent causes of events that do not quite
add up. The original pretense of the expropriation and renovation of the bath-
house was that there were no visitors because of the poverty of the installations
and the costs of transport. However, in an open letter published in the Gazeta de
México in 1794, the new bathhouse operator Andrés Cabellero wrote that one of
the stipulations made by the government for the sale of the hot springs in the 1750s
was the construction of a “bath with its corresponding apartment so that poor
invalids with no income could make use of its well-known benefits,” a requirement
that he gladly fulfilled.36 This flow of poor and indigenous patients to Peñón was
augmented after the 1764 reopening when, in 1768, the Hospital Real de Naturales
contracted to send its indigenous patients daily for treatments.37 Caballero was
willing, he promised, to open more of the renovated baths to poor people for a
quarter of the regular price, if his finances permitted.
There was clearly an established use of the bathhouse among the poor and
the indigenous, but the renovation of the bathhouse at Peñón de los Baños was
aimed at a new group of relatively wealthy bathers, and in fact the new managers
restricted access by poor folks to the resource. In 1791 the city council passed an act
prohibiting Peñón’s administrator from limiting free access by poor bathers to the
bathhouse, or stopping them from taking bottles of water to be used as medicine.38
Very few of those who had previously frequented the bathhouse with its dirt floors
and collapsing roofs could afford the new two-peso/twenty-four-hour rate, nor
were they likely to purchase the pulque, fine wines, and drinking chocolate on sale
at the new store. It was unlikely that the administrator had them in mind when he
assured the “Public” that all kinds of the most select food was available at the store,
“not just the everyday kinds, but also those that the educated and gracious visitor
could entertain guests with.”39 The plebe certainly would not make use of the two
horse-drawn coaches that brought visitors to Peñón from Mexico City (for two or
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    63

three pesos), nor was it very likely that they would have enough stuff with them to
fill the wagon that was for hire. If bathers came on their own horses, and paid to
stable them at the bathhouse, they certainly were among the most economically
privileged of the public.
The new Peñón bathhouse offered all the comforts that could be found at the
spas that were popping up all over Europe to serve the new leisured bourgeoisie:
clean rooms, beds, linens, food, drinks, and socialization with peers. After the
renovation, “the baths were heavily visited year-round,” and the leisured elite came
flocking to the site.40 In 1777 the archbishop of Puebla, Juan de Viera, recounted
that because each apartment had its own bath, “sick people bathe there freely with-
out being registered; usually there are 8–10 families using the bathhouse.”41 But the
medicinal benefits were not the only, or even the principal, attraction for many
users, and soon it became a preferred destination for well-to-do urbanites look-
ing to relax in the countryside. According to Viera, “because the bathhouse is so
large . . . and offers water, greenery, solitude and tranquility, many go there not
to bathe but rather to have fun, hunting ducks and rabbits, attending concerts,
dances and big banquets that often last two or three days.”42 In 1793 taxis were shut-
tling clients to Peñón, and by 1797 a businessman had opened a luxury transport
service that carried patients from Mexico City to Peñón in litters.43
In keeping with the model of the European spa, Caballero asked doctor
Gabriel de Ocampo to publish a scientific, medical statement in conjunction with
the announcement of the opening of the renovated bathhouse in the Gazeta de
México. Ocampo aimed at “encouraging patients in need to use the waters,” offer-
ing the bather an analysis of the therapeutic uses of the waters of Peñón based
in the quickly evolving sciences of chemistry and medicine and in particular the
study carried out on Peñón’s waters by the Royal Botanical Expedition in May
of 1790.44 High temperatures and dissolved gas opened the pores of the skin to
allow substances to enter, and the salts, gas, and heat combined to “unblock, relax
and dissolve, without taking away the necessary tone of the body’s fibers.” These
properties encouraged the circulation of liquids, unblocked the nervous system,
helped with gout and rheumatism, constipation, digestion, and appetite. The exact
mixture and proportion of gases, salts, and heat in Peñón’s waters was a product
of the “sovereign and supreme architect”—God—and could never be replicated in
the doctor’s office. So only by using the new bathhouse could the “virtues” of the
waters be obtained, and only then under the care of “a circumspect and trained
doctor.” The waters, he warned, could have very negative effects if used improperly.
Treatments should be done for ten or more days to gain the “almost miraculous”
results, and they could be carried out on people from less than ten years of age to
more than eighty.
The unequivocally medical justification for the existence and use of the Peñón
bathhouse that is found in Ocampo’s letter strikes an uneasy counterpoint with
the assurances by Caballero that the bathhouse would provide all the bourgeois
64    chapter 4

comforts, and with the descriptions elsewhere of three-day festivities held there
in the 1760s. This is the balance that bathing represented for Mexico’s elite since
the sixteenth century—of promise and peril, rulers and ruled—only resignified
in the Enlightenment discourses of science and citizenship that bubble up in the
Spanish empire during the late eighteenth century. Clearly this was a balance that
governments in Europe were also negotiating, but in Europe the impact of the
bourgeois revolution on water cultures seems to have been steadier, deeper, and
more lineal. In Mexico, on the other hand, the emergence of scientific bathing and
the policing of water was contested in ways that are not visible in the literature on
European spas and hot springs. Humble bathers continued to gain access, one way
or another, to the waters, and continued to use them in accordance with ideas and
beliefs passed down through generations. And, as we shall see, these long-standing
bathing traditions persisted alongside bourgeois involvement in the business and
science of bathing in Mexico.

C O N C LU SIO N : T H E C O N T R A D IC T IO N S O F
E N L IG H T E N M E N T BAT H I N G

Bathing changed in the eighteenth century. Ideas about health and water rooted
in the long tradition of humoral and climatic thought passed down from antiquity
through medieval Christian and Arab scholars were reworked by scholars who
took a scientific experimental and conceptual approach. Empirical knowledge
about the benefits of different waters was systematized according to new catego-
ries and classifications generated by chemists. While scholars in Iberia and the
Americas continued to frame the study of the physical and natural world in reli-
gious terms, this took second place to the descriptions of elements and physical
relationships themselves, and how the stuff of the animal, vegetable, and mineral
kingdoms influenced wellness and illness in people’s bodies. God was given credit
as the supreme author or architect of these patterned relationships, but did not
much occupy the attention of the new scientists. Nor was religion central to the
efforts of government to rule well. The scientific approach to governing was con-
ceived more as a project of managing territories, environments, and populations to
ensure order and well-being than in moral terms. Ideas, beliefs, and practices were
still central to policing, but increasingly they were disassociated from notions of
right and wrong based in spiritual authority. Instead, ideas of civic order and public
health guided the proclamations and efforts of government to rationally manage
the human relationship to water. More than sin, perhaps, the peril of social bathing
was disorder.
The Enlightenment reframing of water culture was rooted in a deep, telluric
transformation of economy and society in the eighteenth century that generated
new social groups and activities. The growing bourgeoisie in Europe had dis-
posable income and leisure time, and this opened up possibilities for making a
 Enlightenment Science of Mineral Springs    65

business of bathing. Spas offered therapy, rural tranquility, and social settings for
newly wealthy urbanites. Capital, loosened from moral and political limits of the
old order, expanded and flowed toward investment opportunities such as medi-
cine, bathing, and infrastructure development. Although Spain and its colonies
participated partially, unevenly, and somewhat belatedly in this historical emer-
gence of capitalism, the Bourbon governments embraced the role of promoting
these trends in the water sector by supporting expeditions to study hot springs,
and the renovation of bathhouses and urban water systems.
The business of bourgeois bathing was not very successful in New Spain. The
Peñón bathhouse was located a few kilometers from the wealthy inhabitants and
cosmopolitan tastes of the capital, which made that particular site attractive to
some investors. But spa promotors confronted deeply rooted peasant and plebian
water cultures based in social and economic principles that were at odds with com-
moditization. Open access and communal property were prickly obstacles to the
enclosure of hot springs, and Peñón’s development as a business moved forward
only with the concession that at least one bath would remain open to the poor who
traditionally used those waters. Hot springs such as San Bartolomé, Topo Chico, or
those in Aguascalientes, far from the capital and its emergent bourgeoisie, would
remain undeveloped until improved transportation infrastructure enabled spa
tourism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see chapters 7 and 8).
Even with its central location, the bourgeois bathhouse at Peñón soon lost
momentum during the War of Independence (1810–21). In 1827, a few years after
the wave of nationalist mobilization forced the Spanish Crown to cede control
over Mexico and most of its American possessions, José María Manero wrote a
letter to the government of the City of Mexico complaining that all the gains made
during the rule of Revillagigedo in ordering, rebuilding, and controlling bathing
practices at Peñón de los Baños had been lost. The owner of the bathhouse had
abandoned his obligations to “repair and maintain the guest rooms, provide all the
necessary goods [soap, sponge, towel, etc.]; to keep them clean.”45
Manero couched his argument in terms of the public need for and benefit from
the baths, thus positing the existence of a national citizenry and of public health
as a domain of political and economic intervention. What his complaint to the
city government did not stress is that people of humble origin had used Peñón’s
springs and installations before the bourgeois rebuilding, that they succeeded in
maintaining some access to it when it was turned into a business, and continued to
make use of the facilities when wealthier Mexicans shied away from their decrepit
condition. Manero himself saw “many poor sick people” continue to go there to
cure their ailments, as did patients under treatment by the hospitals. This use was
year-round, and responded to the unpredictable appearance of ailments rather
than that of the summer spa season that defined elite bathing in Europe. So in fact
much of the “public” was indeed using the bathhouse. But like most of those schol-
ars and officials whose words are recorded in the journals and archives, Manero
66    chapter 4

used the universal category of public to reflect the position of a far smaller, elite
class of people—the rulers, not the ruled.
Humble folks used the hot springs and bathhouses of Mexico throughout the
early nineteenth century, as popular water cultures resumed their ancient courses
and the Enlightenment visions of a well-policed bath faded. That project of the
bourgeois spa, with its genteel leisure practices and scientific purpose, remained
strongly alluring for the elite, however, especially for those who had contact with
bathing culture in Europe and the United States. The business of bathing was in
latency, awaiting the next cycle of accumulation to mobilize the building of infra-
structure, the florescence of concepts, and the policing of practices.

“Like most great ideas of Spanish days, it is now in a state of perfect desolation,
though people still flock there for various complaints. When one goes there to
bathe, it is necessary to carry a mattress, to lie down on when you leave the bath,
linen, a bottle of cold water, of which there is not a drop in the place, and which
is particularly necessary for an invalid in case of faintness—in short, everything
that you may require. . . . We could not help thinking, were these baths in the
hands of some enterprising and speculative Yankee, what a fortune he would
make; how he would build a hotel a la Saratoga, would paper the rooms, and
otherwise beautify this uncouth temple of boiling water.”
—Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 1843

Source: Calderón de la Barca 1843: 403–5.

 5

Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence

in the Late Nineteenth Century
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to
somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the
running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere
else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

In the second half of the nineteenth century artesian wells tapped into ground-
water, ending centuries of water scarcity and greatly expanding access to baths in
Mexico City. The individualized immersion bath (placer) once offered to wealthier,
more European clients was now available to almost everybody. Many of the down-
town bathhouses that served humble city dwellers shuttered their temazcales and
replaced them with low-cost wooden placeres grouped together in a shared room.1
These humble bathhouses charged for each bucket of hot water, but usually pro-
vided all the cold water a client wished, and they used much more water for their
wooden placeres than they had for the temazcales that preceded them. At the same
time as the placer was being adopted by the masses in the old bathhouses of the
city center, new and exclusive bathing facilities were sprouting up on the western
side of the city along the Paseo de la Reforma that offered both social and individ-
ual contacts with great volumes of water in a variety of forms including swimming
pools, tubs, steam rooms, and showers.2 Bathers in both new and old bathhouses
luxuriated in an unprecedented hydraulic opulence provided by seemingly unlim-
ited groundwater from artesian wells.
The abundance of groundwater reshaped the practices and social relations of
bathing in Mexico. In this chapter I discuss how, around 1850, bountiful, clean
water was supplied in places that had not been served previously by existing infra-
structure, and in quantities that enabled bathing with more frequency, with more
water. Existing bathhouses turned into immersion baths, and many new lavish,
modern bathing centers, or balnearios, were built that offered a much wider range
67
68    chapter 5

of contacts with waters, including swimming, diving, wet and dry saunas, drinking
fountains, and splashing pools for children. Groundwater filled pools in urban and
rural settings, expanding the practice of swimming for fun and fitness that was
before mostly limited by access to natural bodies of surface water. The expansion
of bathing in the late nineteenth century was backed by a new assumption that
water was available in large amounts—a structured feeling of hydraulic opulence
that emerged along with artesian wells. The political ecology of groundwater pre-
sented in this chapter shows how infrastructure, bathing practices, and concepts
of cleanliness evolved together.3
Easy groundwater during late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico made
both social and individual bathing more common. Jeff Wiltse shows that in the
United States after 1940, extensive water infrastructure enabled the proliferation
of private backyard pools, resulting in Americans “bathing alone” rather than
together in public pools.4 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in
Mexico we see a similar growth of the water supply, but the individualization of
bathing was a more ambivalent process. Despite the availability of water, and the
connotations of luxury and modernity offered by private bathing, Mexicans con-
tinued to bathe together. Poor people soaked and scrubbed in individual placeres
in large shared rooms, and wealthy Mexicans met to socialize and take the waters
in elaborate bathhouses. While the hygienic and sanitary function of bathhouses
slowly moved to household bathrooms in the twentieth century, social bathing for
fun and fitness continued to flourish in the country’s baths.

T H E G R OU N DWAT E R R EVO LU T IO N

The scarcity of clean water that characterized the colonial period continued
unabated after independence, as did government efforts to police the shortage
through the identification of new sources and the construction of infrastructure.
As was discussed in chapter 4, for centuries water from the aqueducts of Mexico
City was concessioned to wealthy property owners or delivered to the public
fountains. There were also shallow wells used by the city government for cleaning
the streets, and the plebian mass often used these for their houses, their animals,
themselves, and their clothes, as they did the water that flowed through the city’s
drainage canals and the rivers on the outskirts of the city. People liked to wash and
bathe in the water of the wells and drainage canals because it was softer than the
city water and produced more suds. More importantly, it was available and free.
But the quality of those waters was dubious and the public bathing they supported
was frowned upon by many.
In the 1830s city officials sought to increase the supply of water, and set their
sights on the Xacopinca spring, located to the north near the towns of Azcapotzalco
and Tacuba. This was a spring that first served the pre-Hispanic settlements on the
islands in the lake, conducting water through an aqueduct to the town of Tlatelolco,
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    69

north of Tenochtitlán. In the 1400s this water system was overshadowed by the
aqueduct built to carry water from the Chapultepec springs to Tenochtitlán. After
it was destroyed by the Spaniards, the Xacopinca aqueduct was only restored to
working order for a brief time at the beginning of the seventeenth century, despite
periodic renewed interest. The city owned the spring, and in 1839 once again stud-
ied the possibility of integrating Xacopinca into the city’s infrastructure, calculating
that the sale of the water could pay for the works. In 1843 the city signed a deal with
a private investor who offered to finance and build an aqueduct from the Xacopinca
spring to the fountain in the plaza of Tlatelolco in exchange for the right to sell the
water. In order to stop the existing access and uses of the water by local peasants,
the business was given permission to build walls around the water source.
The chemist Leopoldo Río de la Loza was commissioned to conduct an analysis
of the mineral and biological contents of the Xacopinca waters.5 He found it to be
“better” (less dissolved solids) than the agua gorda (hard water—literally “thick
water”) of Chapultpec and “worse” than the agua delgada (soft water—­literally
“thin water”) of Santa Fe, and concluded that channeling the spring would have the
double benefit of providing potable water for the city and removing an unhealthy
swamp at the site of the spring.6 The gradient for the kilometer-long aqueduct to
deliver the water to Tlatelolco was adequate, but by the 1850s the springflow had
dwindled so much that there was not enough pressure to move the water down
the aqueduct, and the quantity of water was insufficient to justify the expense.7
With this plan to increase supplies of water frustrated, in 1854 the city adminis-
trators instead reduced the amount of water delivered to each user by installing
“economical faucets” throughout the system, a measure that raised the ire of the
bathhouse proprietors.8
Despite the scarcity of water, the demand for baths continued to increase, and
businessmen built new baths or expanded existing ones. Santiago Vega founded
the Baños del Amor de Dios in 1853, and in 1866 asked for a fifty percent increase
in the water concession. In 1856 José Guadalupe Velásquez asked for “one more
concession” of water for his baños at Number 11 Calle Don Toribio, and the next
year Manuel Murguía petitioned the city for a merced of five “pajas de agua” (about
10 cc/second) for a new bathhouse he aimed to build in the Plazuela de Juan
Carbonero. The bathhouse was built and the water delivered, but subsequent pleas
for more water in 1861 and 1877 suggest that the number of people in the city who
wished to bathe kept growing.9
After 1850, the perforation of artesian wells seemed to erase the limits to the
supply of good quality water. Engineers armed with new drilling equipment and
techniques opened hundreds of artesian wells in the Valley of Mexico during
the last half of the nineteenth century, part of a global groundwater revolution.10
Artesian waters emerge under their own pressure, without pumping. Wells are
drilled in a location where the surface of the ground, or wellhead, is lower than a
portion of the aquifer that lies above the wellhead, and so the water flows downhill
70    chapter 5

within the aquifer and then flows up and out of the well bore. This is common for
aquifers located in sloping land, such as the Valley of Mexico. Artesian wells mimic
naturally occurring springs, the difference being that a route is opened artificially
by a drill for the water to reach the surface. The Valley of Mexico was a geological
formation that was suited to artesian wells, as there were altitude differentials in
the subsoil water that created hydrostatic pressure that was maintained by geologi-
cal formations of alluvial silt and clay. In that context, water would spring unaided
anywhere that a well opened access to that confined aquifer.
In Mexico, attempts had been made in the early part of the nineteenth century,
but artesian wells only became common in the 1850s.11 This was largely due to the
efforts of Sebastián Pane, who by 1854 had opened at least 20 artesian wells, and
by 1857 had completed 144 wells, 24 for use in irrigation and the control of dust
on public roads, and 120 for the houses of individuals.12 Pane used the “Chinese”
system of drilling, a technique of percussion drilling with a heavy chisel on the end
of a rope, which was pioneered a thousand years ago to tap water and natural gas
with wells hundreds of feet deep in the province of Szechuan.13 Soon others were
using a different system that enabled even deeper exploration, and by the 1860s
there was a lively discussion of drilling techniques and many companies were
operating drilling rigs in Mexico.14 Pane, however, continued to lead the industry,
completing hundreds of artesian wells in Mexico City, as well as in the cities of
Veracruz, Tampico, Cordoba, Manzanillo, and Mazatlán.15 In the 1850s he opened
a business office on a plot of land on Paseo de la Reforma, where he contracted to
build wells for individual houses or groups of houses, and a few years later he built
the famous Alberca Pane bathhouse on that property.16 He even received permis-
sion from the Ministry of Development to experiment with using wells to desic-
cate Lake Texcoco by draining its waters into the subsoil.17
The advent of the artesian wells brought easy water, and a hope of finally resolv-
ing centuries of water scarcity and the social struggles and policing engendered by
it. Most of the wells sunk in the city by Pane in the 1850s were for “private houses,”
but three of them—at Los Migueles, Bucareli, and Cordobanes—provided water to
the public in the city center to supplement the Santa Fe aqueduct and the springs
of Chapultepec.18 In 1863 Pane signed a contract with the city’s Comisión de Aguas
to open eight new artesian wells in different plazas in the historical center of
Mexico City, and in 1869 the city ordered another three wells drilled for neighbor-
hoods that did not have adequate water service.19 Some, such as the well in the
plaza of Salto del Agua, served existing public fountains. In 1871 two more were
sunk near San Lázaro and in 1872 twelve more public wells were drilled, with five
of those to the west of the city center on the Paseo de la Reforma.20 Still, most wells
were private, and served the wealthy. By 1883 Mexico City had 483 wells, thanks
to a growing professional cadre of engineers with drilling equipment.21 About a
third of these wells were located in the city’s Octava Demarcación, which included
the new, wealthy neighborhoods to the west of the city center along Paseo de la
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    71

Reforma, from Bucareli to Chapultepec.22 The bathhouses and swimming pools

that were all the rage in the era of President Porfirio Díaz (1877–1911, known as the
“Porfiriato”) were located in this area, and they were served by artesian wells. The
flurry of drilling led by Pane almost doubled the entire water supply in the city
by the 1860s and almost tripled it by 1883.23 In 1895 public artesian wells provided
about a quarter of the water that coursed through the city’s distribution system.24
Hundreds of artesian wells were not capped, but rather left to flow freely and
create wetlands that city leaders viewed as dangerous to public health. Near the
Chapultepec springs, “three or more artesian wells without faucets” coursed, pud-
dled, and eventually mixed with waters leaking from the aqueduct that supplied
the fountain at Salto del Agua.25 But even without this wastage, the huge increase
in water supply between 1853 and 1883 saturated the drainage system in the city,
adding to fears of “infectious waters,” miasmas, putrefaction, and other threats.
In response to this new abundance of groundwater, the city government issued a
series of dispositions regulating extraction but, more than anything, disposal of
the liquid.26 In some cases the government required well operators to channel their
excess waters to public fountains, but these regulations were generally not enforced.
There were signs from the beginning of the boom that groundwater was finite,
but not everyone wished to recognize them. Wells began to dry up and dwindle just
a few years after they were sunk.27 When Antonio Peñafiel visited the Xacopinca
spring in the 1880s to assess the hygienic qualities of its waters, he noted that the
water pressure had fallen so much that the spring was stagnant, although he failed
to link this fact to the rise in the number of artesian wells he documented else-
where.28 The profusion of new artesian wells also caused water pressure to drop
significantly in the aquifer that gave rise to the Chapultepec springs, reducing the
flow through the aqueduct to the fountain at Salto del Agua. But when asked by the
city about the likelihood that these shortages were caused by the installation of an
artesian well nearby in the Hormiga parcel (now next to the presidential residence
in the Bosque de Chapultepec), engineer Francisco Herrera rejected the possibility,
arguing that the springs were just clogged.29 Others in the city government pointed
to the perforation of artesian wells, but this argument did not gain traction among
scientists such as Leopoldo Río de la Loza and Ernesto Craveri, who dismissed the
“common doubts of those who fear that these waters are not permanent,” saying
that it would be “very strange” if the main aquifer (the third one down) lacked
water, even in the dry season.30 When the flow of waters from many artesian wells
dwindled in the 1870s and 1880s, the usual diagnosis was not a reduction of water
pressure due to overextraction, but rather that the wells were clogged.31
Unlike the intensely managed and legislated surface water, it was not at all clear
how to manage or resolve conflicts over groundwater. For example, a well was
opened in the 1860s in the public plaza of Atzcapotzalco that served a group of
nearby homeowners.32 When another well was drilled nearby by another home-
owner, this first group lodged a legal case, claiming that the new well reduced the
72    chapter 5

flow of water to their previously existing one. Because there were no legal prec-
edents for determining the property status of, and rights to, groundwater, Río de la
Loza was asked to comment on the matter. He suggested that the new user should
utilize a different aquifer, at a different depth, but was the first to admit this was not
a solution that could be made universal.
Instead of confronting conflicts over groundwater by regulating extraction,
the city government sought once again to increase supply. Reduced flow from
the Chapultepec springs prompted a two-pronged effort. First, the government
purchased titles to mercedes to increase the amount of water it owned in the
Albercas de Chapultepec. The Alberca Chica was fed by the springs and supplied
the Belen Aqueduct. The Alberca Grande, also known as the Alberca Exterior,
was a deposit on the southern edge of the Bosque (where Avenida Constituyentes
is today) that was used to supply a house, fields, and orchard in Tacubaya owned
by José Amor y Escandón, a descendent of the Conde de Miravalle.33 The title to
this water was purchased by the city, along with titles to the “vertientes del Bosque
de Chapultepec,” which were waters that flowed from the Chapultepec springs,
but which were not captured by the Alberca Chica and the aqueduct and flowed
southward out of the Bosque.34 There was another reservoir, farther along, belong-
ing to the Hacienda de la Teja.35 In addition to these water purchases, the city gov-
ernment cleaned and fixed the Alberca Chica so that it would store more water. As
a result of these measures, in 1870 the engineer Manuel Patiño reported that the
leaks in the Alberca Chica were all repaired and soon there would be more liquid
than could fit in the aqueduct.36
This remedy for the shortage of water for the city came at the expense of those
who, like the large landowner José Amor y Escandón or the inhabitants of the
barrio of San Miguel Chapultepec just south of the Bosque, had used these waters
previously.37 At the end of the nineteenth century this area lay on the outskirts
of the city, and Amor y Escandón owned a swimming pool with dressing rooms
that was a popular destination for both city dwellers and foreign travelers such
as Gilbert Haven, who described an artesian spring that was “the private prop-
erty of Señor Escandón, who makes many a penny out of its waters.”38 In a letter
explaining his grievances, Amor y Escandón argued that the city’s effort to rem-
edy the water scarcity led it to take “all the measures necessary” to capture the
flow from the hardwater springs of the southern part of the Bosque, including
building levees and dikes that prevented the water from reaching his alberca, or
the lands of the Teja and Condesa haciendas, to whom that water had customar-
ily belonged. Amor y Escandón told the city that the loss of water forced him to
close his baños, countering the assumption that the city water supply should be
the foremost priority with the argument that the baths were beneficial for pub-
lic health.39 It is ironic that at least some of the water that was taken from the
Escandón swimming pool in fact ended up in the city’s bathhouses after a long
trip through the aqueduct.
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    73

“We pass out of the gate [of Chapultepec Park], ride under the shading willows by
the watercourses, enter the gardens of the bath, and the enclosure of the spring.
Here is a pool fifty feet square and forty feet deep. The water is so clear that you
can see it breaking out of the rock-bed . . . amidst the ferns and grasses that cover
that natural floor with a perpetual carpet. Here to plunge you will find delight-
ful. . . . An adjoining square the water flows into, whose floor is paved with tiles,
and whose depth is not above your neck. . . . A like bath for ladies is nearby, and
a saunter in the garden follows the refreshment.”
—Gilbert Haven, 1875

Source: Haven 1875: 224–25.

As wells dried up, even more were perforated. In 1900 the city counted 1,200
artesian wells, and they were common outside of Mexico City as well. Jalisco, San
Luis Potosí, Querétaro, and other states had wells for irrigating cities and hacien-
das by the 1860s. In Celaya, Guanajuato, artesian wells tapped thermal aquifers
to supply bathhouses and water fields.40 In 1873, a traveler to that city described
a “bathing establishment, which is supplied by warm water from an Artesian
well . . . There are a series of private compartments, and a large public basin suf-
ficiently deep for swimming purposes.”41
The access to groundwater between 1850 and 1900 revolutionized water culture
in Mexico, marking the beginning of an age of hydraulic opulence and optimism
that continued through much of the twentieth century. Consumers, in particular,
quickly grew accustomed to this new supply of water and practices such as fre-
quent bathing by immersion and swimming that the water enabled. Some water
managers and scientists also assumed that the centuries-old limits to Mexico City’s
water supply had been overcome, despite evidence that subsoil water was finite
and its extraction caused environmental health hazards and land subsidence.
However ephemeral it was, plentiful cheap water restructured feelings about the
relationship of people to their waters and set water managers on a path of increas-
ing supply from which they have not since wavered. Aquifer depletion reduced
hydrostatic pressure and many artesian wells stopped flowing, but the advent of
electrical service at the end of the nineteenth century made it easy to pump the
water from those wells. People got used to having copious quantities of fresh pota-
ble water at hand, and this assumption of hydraulic opulence drove ever-greater
efforts to harness water. To sustain the expansion of water consumption and sup-
ply, in 1884 Antonio Peñafiel set his sights on a bigger prize: the springwaters of
Xochilmilco, twenty-five kilometers away on the southern edge of the Valley of
Mexico. These works were completed in 1908, the first of many such projects that
steadily increased the water consumption of Mexico City over the last century.
74    chapter 5

T H E E X PA N SIO N O F S O C IA L BAT H I N G

Zopopan, Jalisco, Mexico, 1840. A typical Sunday morning in late spring in west-
ern Mexico; the land thirsting for the summer rains soon to come. On the road
leading out of Guadalajara to the west carriages of the well-heeled jostle past folks
walking in huaraches [sandals], all making their way to the public baths near the
towns of Zoquipa and Atemaxac, a mile and half from the city. The small river
is low in the dry season, and there are bathhouses installed all along its course:
improvised structures made of carrizo reeds with grass walls and roofs that afford
some privacy to the modest and the decent. Men and children sit and splash in
the water, laughing and playing, some relaxing. Others have retired to the grassy
embankments to enjoy picnics and purchase “exquisite watermelons and sweet
melons from Caxititlan” from throngs of itinerant vendors announcing their
goods in crisp shouts. Some add to the bustle by singing along with the musicians
wandering among the crowds. The young women walk in pairs and threes along
the riverbank in their weekend attire, freshly picked wildflowers tucked into hair
and hatbands. They are waiting for the waters to warm up so they can take a dip
in the early afternoon. Local indigenous people organize the whole affair, rent-
ing out the bathhouses, selling food, digging out gravel to form swimming pools
in the river, and tending the grassy embankment. The dark clouds assembling
overhead in the late afternoon signal the end is near for the short summer season
of outdoor bathing. When the rains finally come in force, the locals will take
down the bathhouses and store the materials, before the rising waters wash the
baths into memory. But come next summer, fun and fashion will once again get
urbanites from Guadalajara up early in the morning to make the trip to the baths
of Zopopan.
—Ignacio Cumplido, 1842

Source: Cumplido 1842: n.p.

How did Mexicans bathe in the nineteenth century? How did bathing practices
change after 1850 with the hydraulic opulence created by artesian wells? How was
ecology and infrastructure related to culture? Bathing and swimming, like so
many quotidian experiences and activities, are often hard to discern in the archi-
val record. Almanacs and travel literature, however, afford ethnographic glimpses
of these activities in Mexico in the nineteenth century. At the same time, these are
always partial, selective visions that tell us just as much about the cultural assump-
tions of their narrators.
In 1842 Ignacio Cumplido portrayed the leisurely bathing practices of elite
urban Mexicans in a landscape specially managed for this activity. Alexander
Forbes, traveling through Tepic in 1849 and 1850, noted a similar arrangement
of bathhouses “made of wattles, and thatched . . . situated at the river side, where
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    75

the stream is tolerable deep . . . divided into different compartments, and much
used by the better class of inhabitants.”42 Bathing among well-to-do Mexicans
was commonplace, just as it was for their European counterparts, who during
the ­nineteenth century turned freshwater, mineral water, and seawater spas and
resorts into mass leisure destinations. The seaside town of “San Blas,” Forbes con-
tinued, “is frequented by the Tepiqueños, who during the latter part of the dry
season, come down for the sake of sea-bathing.”43
Poor Mexicans ran the bathhouses for the wealthy, but they too bathed. In
1828 George Lyon visited the Pánuco River near Tampico, and described people
“bathing in the river whole families at a time, which appears to be their morning
and evening custom.”44 “Such families as choose to,” he continued, “devote a little
trouble and expense to decency, small spaces are staked off near the banks, and
lightly covered with palm branches: but such niceties are not much attended to;
both sexes bathe without scruple at the same time, and many of the young women
swim extremely well.”45 Steaming up the Río Bravo/Grande in the 1840s, Corydon
Donnavan spied “droves of joyous young girls disporting like mermaids among
the waters.”46 A decade later on the same river, Emmanuel Domenech noted that “a
number of people of every age and each sex were bathing.”47 Obviously impressed
by the propensity of Mexicans to take to the waters, another traveler in the 1840s
declared, “whenever I was in sight of the river, or the canal of the mills, I could
behold men, women and children floundering in the water.”48
It is clear in these accounts from the mid-nineteenth century that bathing and
swimming in springs, rivers, and seas were social activities that were fun for people
from all walks of life. In the torrid river drainages of the Gulf Coast bathing and
swimming allowed them to cool off and play. But bathing was also about cleaning
bodies and clothes. Except for the wealthy, who had servants to do their work,
people swam, bathed, and washed clothes at the same time. Alexander Forbes
described elite social bathing, but also noted that the humble people in Tepic went
to “pozos (swimming holes) . . . much used by laundresses and bathers . . . usually
large holes dug just below the springs.”49 On the river in the nearby city of Colima,
John Lewis Geiger described the “numerous baths erected along its course, and the
temporary laundry establishments,” all grouped together.50
Women, playing and bathing, attracted the interest of travelers, men especially,
who never failed to comment on their nakedness. When George Ruxton rode into
Querétaro on horseback in the mid-1840s, he was surprised to come across “a bevy
of women and girls ‘in the garb of Eve’ and in open day, tumbling and splashing in
the water.” When his group stopped to watch “they were attacked by the swarthy
naiads with laughing and splashing, and shouts of ‘¡ay que sin verguenzas!’—what
shameful rogues!—¡echales muchachas!—at them, girls; splash the rascals—and
into our faces came showers of water, until, drenched to the skin, we were glad
to beat a retreat.”51 In Tepic’s river Alexander Forbes always found a way to gaze
upon “two or three damsels sittin’ in it, rather in undress, washing their hair.” “The
76    chapter 5

women,” he continued, “all have beautiful hair, and seem to take great pains in
washing and cultivating it, as you may see them all day in the river by scores.”52
These passages resound with the orientalist titillation of the odalisque, but nev-
ertheless show that undressing and bathing in public was an everyday and rather
unexceptional activity. The forms of modesty, honor, and respect that without a
doubt regulated this activity were beyond the comprehension of the travelers, who
mistook their ignorance of local scruples for an absence of scruples.
At the end of the nineteenth century the influx of capital to Mexico led to the
expansion of infrastructure, economic growth, and the accentuation of class dynam-
ics from the industrial era. These changes had important effects on bathing. When
Albert Gilliam visited the Aguascalientes hot springs in 1846 they were “not covered
by houses, or shelter of any kind, and both rural poor and city dwellers used them
in their rustic state, often seeking cures.”53 By the 1880s, however there were “exten-
sive and commodious bathing houses . . . surrounded with flower gardens” for the
wealthy in Aguascalientes, but even more so for the new waves of tourists arriving
by train from Mexico City and the United States.54 While these bathhouses had
shared public swimming spaces, their clients washed in individual bathing rooms,
where privacy enabled modesty. Those unable to afford such luxuries continued to
bathe as always, in the community waters, often in mixed company.
Travelers to Mexico in the late nineteenth century were likely to be adventur-
ous elements of the leisured bourgeoisie from Europe and the United States, riding
the new railroads. They were quite aware of the distinctions between wealthy and
poor in Mexico, and how these played out in bathing practices. Privacy and nudity
were directly connected to social class, and some travelers recognized this. Despite
the flood of capital into Mexico during the Porfiriato, and the rapid growth of
economy and infrastructure, many Mexicans were so poor that they had only one
change of clothes. Blake and Sullivan remarked “nine times out of ten the one suit,
noonday and night, forms the entire stock of wearing apparel.”55 In other words,
when women washed clothes, their owners were naked. As Francis Smith put it,
there were two classes in the hot springs in Aguascalientes, “those who have some-
thing on and those who have nothing.”56 Cora Crawford, for example, commented
that in Aguascalientes there “runs an acequia where all the washer-women of the
town gather,” and where “the poor congregate because the luxuries of the private
bath-houses are beyond their reach.”57
Travelers in the mid-nineteenth century depicted nude bathing in public as
somewhat humorous, but by the late nineteenth century they responded to it
as a moral or social problem. On the one hand, consider the shock expressed
by Crawford upon witnessing an “inhuman scene” in the hot springs town of
Aguascalientes, where, “en cueros [naked], and with utter abandon, men, women
and children plunge together into the water.”58 Julia Jackson described the same
scene as “startling”: hundreds of people “bathing and disporting themselves in the
water, with an absence of bathing dresses and an unconsciousness of being visible
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    77

to the naked eye.”59 On the other hand, some travelers adopted a position of cul-
tural relativism and self-reflective detachment. Frank Collins Baker viewed a scene
of men and women bathing naked—each group on opposing banks of the river—
with the scientific eye of a naturalist. “It seemed rather strange to us,” he reflected,
“but was the custom, and of course, aroused no curiosity among the inhabitants.”60
Francis Smith also saw mixed-sex social bathing by the poor as “one of the cus-
toms of the country.”61 Others recognized the practicality of this kind of bathing.
“Judging from the number of primitive bathing and washing establishments we
met by country brooks and city ditches,” Mary Blake and Margaret Sullivan wrote,
“wherein father, mother, children and clothes were all being cleaned together, I
am inclined to think they prefer the public demonstration. And why should they
not, if it be simple and easier?”62 Regardless of the stance taken by the traveler,
these accounts reflect a widening gap in the bathing infrastructures and practices
of the wealthy and poor in many places in Mexico during the second part of the
nineteenth century.
The narratives about bathing display the perspective of the narrators, but they
also provide ethnographic glimpses of everyday interactions that people had with
water. For example, even as they eroticized Mexican women, travelers saw them
as workers, washing clothes and raising children. Donnavan argued that “women
perform this very necessary part of household labor, in the river,”63 and Alsden
Case described:

scores of women contentedly scrubbing, sudsing, and wringing their clothes, for
the river bank is the universal washing place in Mexico. Flat stones served as wash-
boards. All the bushes and rocks of the vicinity were decorated with clothes. And
the bathers! Children, children everywhere, with skins all shades of brown. Every
woman had brought her tribe, and judging from the appearances, their clothes were
being washed “while they waited!”64

The same scene was repeated in the urban bathhouses. Antonio García Cubas
revealed his anxieties about class and contagion when he described the “dirty cus-
tom” of mothers bathing their children in their leftover bathwater in the small
wooden tubs that lined the collective bathing rooms of the downtown bathhouses
that served the poor, rooms still known in 1900 as temazcales despite the fact that
those steambaths had been mostly eliminated by that time in Mexico City.65 The
gendered division of labor charged poor women with the responsibility for wash-
ing clothes and bathing children—their own as well as those of others.
Travelers understood their social distance from and uneasiness with poor
Mexicans in the idiom of cleanliness and hygiene. Blake and Sullivan had been
told that Mexicans were dirty, but they discovered that bathing was directly related
to the availability of water. “We found them dirty,” they wrote, “as regards personal
cleanliness, in towns like Chihuahua and Zacatecas, where water has to be dipped
with a gourd from the basin of a stone fountain, with scores awaiting their turn,
78    chapter 5

or bought from a carrier. But in Aguas Calientes . . . there was no suspicion of

uncleanliness.”66 Sometimes a traveler would go to lengths to reconcile the precon-
ception that Mexicans were dirty with the empirical data that they were constantly
bathing. “Though every shop in every city keeps and sells vast quantities of soap,”
wrote Frederick Ober, “and though everybody in the neighborhood of a stream is
constantly washing, both himself and his garments, yet [sic] every person of the
lower order is as dirty as though just dipped in a city sewer.”67 Others racialized
the perception of uncleanliness, assuming that all who did not bathe were Indians.
“The bulk of the poorer population of the capital are Indians, who greatly resent
any sanitary reforms,” declared William Carson, “the Indian masses regard water
with aversion and soap with horror.”68 Joséph McCarty extended this derision to
poor mestizos, who were, he said, “not over fond of the bath tub.”69

Durango, 1912. “the mozo [attendant] led us to a large room, with a window open-
ing into a garden, where we could see orange trees and flowers. In the center of
the room there was a huge tank, perhaps eight feet square and four feet deep,
empty and spotlessly clean, with steps leading down to the bottom. The mozo
brought fresh straw mats, two large cotton sheets, rough towels, a little toilet glass
with fittings, soap and zacate [fiber], which does service as a sponge. The soap
and zacate were in small, tin dishes which float on the water, and are thus near
at hand when required. He next pulled out a wooden plug in the side of the tank
and a torrent of water gushed in, filling the tank to the height of a man’s waist
where we could divest ourselves of our clothing. Bob jumped in without ado; but
I paused on the top step and dipped in a wary toe to try the water. Finding it only
a trifle cooler than body temperature, I too made the plunge and reveled in the
soft, greenish clear water, which carries iron and Sulphur. All the cities of Mexico
are favored with fine baths, but for delightful water and arrangements I commend
‘las Canoas’ of Durango.”
—Wallace Gillpatrick, 1912

Source: Gillpatrick 1912: 8–9.

Traveler accounts note the existence of baths in Mexico City in the early part of
the nineteenth century, but after 1850 artesian wells supplied bathing facilities
throughout Mexico.70 “You will find them everywhere in the large cities,” wrote
one man in 1886, “and their appointments are first class.”71 Travelers lauded the
baths in Veracruz, Orizaba, Xalapa, San Luis Potosí, even the remote northern
city of Durango.72 And while rural dwellers continued to utilize rivers and springs
for washing, bathhouses were also increasingly common even in small towns in
Mexico. In 1867, for example, James Elton wrote that “the Mexicans are in advance
of many European cities with regard to their baths, for in every small town you will
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    79

find at least one Casa de Baños . . . all of them being clean and neatly kept, and the
tariff exceedingly low.”73 Twenty years later Fanny Iglehart noted that “comfortable
and luxurious public baths—warm and cold—for all classes exist everywhere.”74
Guadalajara was said to have twenty-six public baths at the turn of the twentieth
century. By that time many Mexicans in towns and provincial cities had grown
accustomed to bathing frequently in the profusion of public baths, as very few
private houses had bathrooms before 1900.

Mexico City, 1886. “. . . while the boys went on to the castle, the girls were left at a
corner where a long sign on some low rambling building advertised the Baños de
Rosario. They passed through a gateway into a little office with a counter, where
tickets were given them in exchange for a moderate sum, and then, following a
loosely clad muchacho across the usual garden, they were shown into the bath. It
was an immense high place, lighted only from the top, and when the high double
door was closed upon them, and Bessie had drawn a huge bolt inside to secure
it, they felt somewhat solemn, for all was still within except a sound of rushing
water, although in the distance they heard splashing and the laughter of other
bathers in other rooms like this one. The floor was brick, the whole space being
occupied with a round swimming-place twelve of fifteen feet across. Except a
walk two or three feet around it. The edge of the bath was higher on one side than
the other, so that running water, coming into the bottom of the bath, while it kept
it constantly full, was constantly flowing over the lower margin, where it ran off
through a sort of trough. In a moderately dry corner, stood a dressing table with
a glass over it, covered with the usual bath implements. There were a couple of
chairs by it, with matting in front of them for the feet. In the opposite corner was
a shower-bath, and in the space between the clear green reservoir of fresh water,
about four feet deep, with a smooth bottom of red brick. It was most inviting.
Bessie scorning the steps, had soon plunged in, and was swimming about joyfully
in the mild soft water. Helena more cautiously descended the steps and found
the water just up to her chin. When they were refreshed rubbed and dressed,
they came out again into the office. Bessie thought she was to return the torn-off
scraps of yellow tickets which the muchacho had given back to her, but a chorus
of assistants exclaimed that these were good for a return ride to the city.”
—Edward and Susan Hale, 1893

Source: Hale and Hale 1893: 179.

It was Mexico City, however, that was the capital of bathhouses, and by 1867 “their
number was legion.”75 The oldest ones were located in the city center, but new
ones sprung up in the late nineteenth century on the outskirts of town, especially
along the Paseo de la Reforma, which was planned during the French occupa-
tion and often described as the Champs-Élysées of Mexico. Sebastián Pane, the
80    chapter 5

entrepreneur who pushed forward the groundwater revolution with his drill-
ing rig, was also a leader in the massification of bathing. He opened the famous
“Alberca Pane” (“Pane’s Pool”) in 1864 on a vacant piece of land on the Paseo de la
Reforma near the statue of Cristobal Colon, and supplied its multiple pools, show-
ers, and baths with three artesian wells. Other similar establishments followed on
its heels, including the Baños Osorio and Baños Blasio right next door, creating
a new genre of bathing establishment—the balneario—that had swimming pools
and was as much a waterpark as a bathhouse. Such was the abundance of artesian
groundwater that one of the balnearios on the Reforma offered baths for horses,
and the Alberca Pane had a free tank of constantly flowing water outside the build-
ing for use by soldiers and the poor.76 The artesian wells gushed continuously,
nourishing the baths before spilling into the drains, sewers, and canals that led
east to Lake Texcoco. The Albercas Pane and Osorio each had three artesian wells,
and the one that served the main swimming pool of the Pane could fill a water
carrier’s jar ninety times a minute.77 These new luxury bathhouses sometimes had
romantic names, such as “Baños Factor” and “El Harem,” and they offered a wide
array of aquatic experiences: “lukewarm baths, hydrotherapeutic baths, russian
baths, and turco-roman baths; the bathhouses had installations suited for practic-
ing swimming.”78

Mexico City, 1886. “On another Calzada, not far away from the Alameda, were
the Baños del Recreo, and it was well to take this recreation on their way back to
the hotel. A friendly woman, mistress of the establishment, sold them tickets at
a counter in a little room at the entrance of the baths. Passing through this they
came into a little snug garden, and there was a noise of water rushing, and the
sounds of merry laughter from the girl’s swimming bath. While their baths were
being prepared they sat in the corridor looking at the flowers, while Tom stole a
‘ladies delight’ for his buttonhole. Then each retired to his or her little cell for a
refreshing plunge in warm or cold water, after which they were ready for a brisk
walk home, or to take the street car at the archway.”
—Edward and Susan Hale, 1893

Source: Hale and Hale 1893: 112–13.

As Macías-González (2012) shows us, during the late nineteenth-century admin-

istration of President Porfirio Díaz, going to the new bathhouses was an activity
laden with meanings of class, status, and civility. The Alberca Pane was a favorite
social setting of the elite, most notably President Díaz himself, who at the advice
of his physician and friend, Eduardo Liceaga, sought the fortifying and curative
effects of taking the waters. “The Alberca Pane,” declared a railway promotional
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    81

Figure 4. Alberca Pane. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 2, p. 284.

travel book in 1894, “is the largest and finest in every respect,” with “shower, swim,
Roman, Russian and Turkish baths.”79 Much like a European spa, the Alberca
Pane offered a wide assortment of cultural and social activities, including gardens,
dining rooms, musical performances, swimming lessons, sporting events, hair-
dressers and barbers, and medical attention. The Alberca Pane’s “seductive ori-
ental bath” was especially tailored for the wealthy, with its “beautiful garden and
kiosks, carpets, walnut chairs, mirrors, shell-covered furniture” and elaborately
tiled pool.80 Composer, violinist, and popular icon Juventino Rosas gained much
of his fame playing Straussian waltzes for the wealthy at the Alberca Pane and the
Baños Factor.81 His song “Junto al Manantial” [“Beside the Spring”] was composed
for the birthday party of the wife of the owner of one of the baths.82 Long weekday
afternoons and entire weekend days were spent bathing, eating, socializing, and
performing other rituals of class distinction.
As the century progressed, these prominent bathhouses brought together
increasingly wider swaths of Mexican society into a hierarchical but still unified
space. “There are baths of true luxury,” wrote Manuel Rivera Cambas, “and others
for social classes with few resources; they are divided in categories aligned with the
people that use them, and thus their cost.”83 And the baths were not just for men,
although the rules of propriety ensured that men and women occupied entirely
82    chapter 5

Figure 5. Baños. De Cuéllar 1889.

separate bathing facilities. In his 1889 novel Baile y Cochino, José de Cuéllar tells
the story of three sisters from more humble origins who bathed regularly at the
Alberca Pane for hygiene, health, and, not least, to mingle with the well-to-do in
these new spaces of leisure. Middle-class Mexicans often took the “baths route”
(circuito de baños) streetcar, operated by the Alberca Pane, paying 50 centavos for
a ticket that included entrance to the Russian baths, 25 centavos for the hydro-
therapy baths and lukewarm baths, or 12 centavos for the coldwater baths.84 It was
ordinary to see parades of young women with their hair in towels, returning home
after their baths on the “Baños” streetcar line.85
Poor city dwellers also participated in the public rituals of hygiene and cleanli-
ness. Luxury bathhouses such as the Alberca Pane brought together the middle
and upper classes in shared spaces and activities that fortified a notion of belong-
ing to a civilized nation, but they also provided baths for the poor. While the
poor could not afford to use the facilities within the bathhouses, they made use
of a tank offered by the Alberca Pane free to the public on the street, and in this
way experienced the hydraulic opulence and public rituals of hygiene and cleanli-
ness.86 When the flow of its artesian wells diminished in the 1890s, the Alberca
Pane asked for three mercedes of additional surface water from the city govern-
ment to support an expansion of its facilities and “a reduced price to poor people,”
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    83

which was awarded on the basis that the bathhouse provided a “benefit to public
hygiene and health.”87
In the cities of Europe and North America, municipal governments built bath-
houses beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century with the purpose of
promoting cleanliness among the working class,88 and the government of Mexico
City made similar plans, beginning in 1881, to provide public bathhouses in each
of the neediest zones of the four cardinal directions in the city, where, city regidor
(alderman) Ignacio Toro declared, “the poor bathe and wash their clothes in the
canals and ditches, which is manifestly unhygienic” and encourages “immoral”
public nudity.89 The public works commission explained to the regidores that pub-
lic bathhouses had “been built with brilliant success in England; and in France a
fund of 600,000 francs had been created for the same purpose.”90

“Thanks to notions of popular hygiene that spread more and more every day;
thanks to the progress and aspiration of our civilization; we vehemently support,
in order to secure greater well-being, the widespread use of baths in our city.
You can see a great number of people of the lowest classes that make use of the
canals and even drainage ditches to wash their clothes and bodies, mostly on
their days off. If they do it in those places that are full of germs of diseases that
spread through the waters, it is because they have nowhere else to do so for free.”
—Mexico City Public Works Commission, 1895

Source: AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3639, Exp. 1064 (1895).

These planned municipal bathhouses were to provide immersion baths as well

as laundry facilities, and in 1887 eleven thousand pesos were authorized for the
construction of the first such facility in Mexico, dedicated to serving women. The
money never appeared, however, and the project ran afoul due to a number of other
problems. The bathhouses required a quarter of a city block, and such properties
were unavailable, as was the water needed for the bathhouses. In 1891 a new proposal
was submitted to the city council by Antonio Torres for a smaller, less costly bath-
house, with multiple entrances, fewer laundry basins, and more bathtubs. Torres
was particularly worried about offering too many sinks, because “it would enable
the paid washerwomen to go there rather than those truly in need.”91 By June of 1891
the city had agreed to purchase a lot in the Colonia Morelos for the bathhouse, and
contracted Guillermo Paterson to drill an artesian well to supply the water.
In the end, however, the bathhouse was not built. Paterson assured the city that
water had been found in a nearby lot at 100 meters, but only found the liquid at 222
meters after drilling for seven months, more than doubling the costs. The process
of purchasing the lot for the bathhouse dragged on and on, and the money for the
84    chapter 5

construction was never delivered. The burbling artesian well became a fountain
for the neighborhood, and someone installed themselves as caretaker of the well
and the property.92

“In April to June, when the heat is greatest in the capital, you see the masses of
inhabitants going to the pools with the most extraordinary dedication. But not
only at that time: they go most of the year, because in addition to the pools fed by
artesian wells there are also showers, russian [sic] baths and all the others that are
used for medicine or recreation. In June more than 40,000 bathers go to the pools,
arriving on the trams, in cars, on foot or horseback, happy caravans going to those
wonderful leafy spaces where the trees, the landscape and the company call their
attention. There are beautiful young women with their hair down and adorned with
flowers, the throngs of vendors selling snacks, and often enthusiastic musicians. . .”
—Manuel Rivera Cambas, c. 1880

Source: Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 2: 285.

The Feast Day of Saint John the Baptist, June 24, was a crucial event in the conforma-
tion of water culture in modern Mexico City. On this warm summer day Mexicans
traditionally celebrated the Catholic association between purification and water by
visiting a bathhouse or a nearby river or spring. A common saying was that bathing
on that day would give “beauty to the maiden, vigor to the matron, and freshness
to the old maid.”93 This custom grew more elaborate with the hydraulic opulence of
artesian wells and the proliferation of bathhouses such as the Alberca Pane in the late
nineteenth century. The baths and pools filled to capacity on that day with children
and adults enjoying the water much more in pursuit of ludic than spiritual ends.

“From the first ring of the church bells in the morning [of Día de San Juan], those
who were heading to the baths took to the streets happily singing. . . . Some took
the road to Chapultepec in wagons and trams, others headed off to the differ-
ent baths around the city, which were swept, washed and decorated with willow
branches around the patios, doors and windows, and sparkling everywhere with
decorations. . . . The energy in the baths were extraordinary, and the general hap-
piness was increased by the sounds of the musicians. The bathers reflected this
emotion with their shouts and laughter, the splashes made every time one of them
dove in. . . . It was a custom in all the baths to give away fruit, soap and sponges. . .”
—Antonio García Cubas, 1904

Source: García Cubas 1904: 374.

 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    85

The día de San Juan, like other festival days, was intensely social. Bathhouse own-
ers adorned their buildings with plants, banners, flags, and other decorations,
and vendors set up carts and stands catering to the crowds that descended on the
baths. Grooming items were available everywhere, and the bathhouses themselves
offered gifts of soap and small scrubbing pads made of cactus fiber (estropajos,
made of ixtle) to their clients. In addition, all sorts of food was available on the
streets outside the bathhouses and pools.

“In one tank one hundred and fifty or more bathers may be seen at once, throw-
ing themselves head first, diving and swimming, or standing half submerged, or
perhaps jumping from the spring-board. To all these gyrations add the screams
of the multitude, the shrieks of the bathers and the people on shoe selling a
thousand and one articles beneath the rays of a scorching sun, to complete the
scene. Though many pursuits and avocations are carried on, the dominating and
supreme desire of the crowd is to get wet.”
—Fanny Iglehart, 1887

Source: Iglehart 1887: 275.

Bathing in the bathhouses of late nineteenth-century Mexico was an activity in

which a wide swath of society participated, and it helped generate a sense of the
nation rooted in traditional customs such as those of the día de San Juan as well
as new practices of civilized cosmopolitanism. Artesian wells allowed sumptuous
practices of immersion, once a symbol of European culture and a privilege of the
elite, to soak far down into Mexican society. Bathing establishments remained
segregated along class lines, but the availability of bathhouses at all price points
made it possible to imagine that all Mexicans were unified as a nation that bathed
together. This vision placed Mexico on the same level as Europe, and was bolstered
by an evolutionary narrative that seized upon bathing and cleanliness as signs of
civilization. As one intellectual from the time stated, “baths with the luxury and
dimensions that the ones on Bucareli and Reforma already have in Mexico, are an
undeniable proof of advanced civilization.”94
While in the 1840s Ignacio Cumplido described the rustic baths of Guadalajara
as desirable for their simplicity, and derided the Roman baths as decadent, by the
1880s Rivera Cambas cast this classical opulence in a positive light, stressing the con-
tinuities with modern Mexico. “Although our civilization has not refined its sense
of taste to the degree that it was in the era of Cicero, we nevertheless have beautiful
medicinal and recreational baths,” he wrote.95 “Someone once said, and was right,”
declared Prantl and Groso, “that the level of culture of a people is manifested in the
number and quality of its bathhouses.” Mexico was still at a middling level in these
86    chapter 5

terms, they continued, but nonetheless “fulfilled the requirements of cleanliness,

comfort and hygiene demanded by such a civilized metropolis as ours.”96
Baths and bathing in Porfirian Mexico evoked classical civilizations by borrow-
ing Roman, Greek, Moorish, and Aztec elements. As Mexico’s economy and state
grew in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the emergent Mexican bour-
geoisie pushed back against unilineal evolutionary thinking that cast the country as
barbaric and “backward,” by claiming its own classical tradition. Just as European
countries took the mantle of civilization from Greece and Rome, Mexican intel-
lectuals such as Antonio Peñafiel made an antiquarian effort to recover Mexico’s
roots in the complex societies of Mesoamerica.97 National histories from this time
drew continuities to the grandeur of Tenochtitlán as well as Spain,98 a narrative
that was projected internationally in settings such as the Universal Expositions in
Paris in 1889 and 1900, for which Peñafiel designed a “Mexican Pavilion” in neo-
Aztec architectural style.99 At home in Mexico City, statues of Cuauhtémoc, the
last Aztec emperor, and two “Indios Verdes” graced the Paseo de la Reforma along
with those of Christopher Columbus and King Carlos IV of Spain.

“Who says our beloved Mexico is not civilized? What a crass mistake! And is
there anyone in Mexico who complains of an incurable disease? No one, no one,
no one. Who is going to get sick in Paradise? Mexico is the Garden of Eden with
those baths.”
—Artemio de Valle Arizpe, 1946

Source: De Valle Arizpe 1946: 156.

Mexico’s bathhouses evoked the splendor, opulence, and refinement of the classical
Mediterranean world. The “Coliseo Nuevo” (New Coliseum), founded around 1850
by an expatriate Italian general, was renamed “The Harem” soon after.100 In 1887
the Alberca Pane installed a “Turkish-Roman” bath they called El Hammam (the
Arabic name for the classical Islamic bathhouse) that offered a sumptuous Roman
sequence of water encounters: the tepidarium, the caldarium, the laconicum, the
alipterium, the lavatorium, and finally “showers of different temperatures” or a
cold plunge bath.101 The “Turkish bath,” introduced around 1900 to Mexico City,
offered a hot steam treatment quite similar to that of the temazcal before it, but for
an elite clientele and with very different connotations.102
Mexico’s civilized trajectory could also be clearly seen in the Bosque de
Chapultepec. The Bosque was widely known to be a hunting ground and park for
the Aztec rulers, and the famed springs, the pools that collected their water, and
the aqueduct that delivered it to the city center were all associated with the Aztecs,
who first built the water system. The smallest spring-fed pool was the source of
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    87

Figure 6. Baños de Chapultepec. Michaud 1874. With permission of Universidad Nacional

Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Archivo Fotográfico Manuel
­Toussaint, Colección Julio Michaud.

water for the aqueduct, and was the oldest. Travelers and locals viewed it as “an
interesting relic of Moctezuma’s glory,” referring to it as “Moctezuma’s Bath” and
“Moctezuma’s Pool,” and believing that it “was probably used by him.”103 In fact,
the pool was built as a reservoir for the water that flowed to the aqueduct, and it
is highly unlikely that it was used by Moctezuma for bathing or swimming given
that it was the water source for the city, and that people “bathed” in temazcales.
The idea that this was an Aztec bath may have been influenced by a famous pool
in the hills near Texcoco, known as Nezahualcóyotl’s Baths, a common stop on the
itineraries of travelers to Mexico since the colonial period that gained renewed
fame with the growth of tourism in the late nineteenth century.
By the 1860s the owners of Chapultepec’s Alberca Grande (also known as the
“Alberca de los Nadadores” or the “Swimming Pool”) had built a bathhouse to
serve the public.104 This was the most popular swimming pool for city dwellers of
some means until the Alberca Pane and its neighbors opened up on Reforma. The
bathhouse was built in a neoclassical architecture, and decorated “in the style of
Pompeii,” with a large swimming pool fed by the springs and smaller, private pools
and rooms that received the water from the Alberca Grande.105 There were gardens
with sandy walkways shaded by enormous ahuehuete (cypress) trees. Antonio
García Cubas describes (with his typical thesaurical largesse) a “rich and endless
spring almost overflowing the pool that bounded its transparent waters, where the
88    chapter 5

good swimmers showed off their prowess, jumping off the high guardrails into the
liquid to catch a silver coin as it sank, or to lie beneath the tree roots in the water
to display their ability to hold their breath as well as the best divers.”106 One trav-
eler called a swimmer “a swarthy son of Aztecs,” reinforcing the popular narrative
about the classical Mesoamerican origins to bathing in Mexico.107
The Alberca de los Nadadores operated from the 1860s until about 1880, when
the profusion of artesian wells around the springs reduced their water levels so
much that the city stepped in to purchase the title to all the springwaters and chan-
nel them to the aqueduct that led downtown. So much water was extracted from
the subsoil in Chapultepec that the ancient ahuehuete trees—also associated with
the Aztecs—began to die, prompting caretakers to ask the city for a concession
of springwater to irrigate them.108 By the time García Cubas wrote his memoirs
in 1904, the pool was dry and already eulogized as the remnant of a noble and
hygienic indigenous civilization. “Montezuma’s bath still stands,” wrote Crawford
in 1899, “a charming bit of ruins.”109
At first only the relatively wealthy could afford the sumptuous, novel encoun-
ters with water offered at the city’s new bathhouses. But as we will see in the next
chapter, as water became more available greater numbers of bathhouses opened,
and poorer people had more access to swimming pools, placeres, and showers.
Like many other elite practices and symbols, the new forms of bathing were slowly
adopted by the masses. By the 1920s Mexico’s bathhouses served a mostly popular
clientele, as the opulence of water, confirmed by the Xochimilco aqueduct, trickled
down through society. Partially as a result of the massification of social bathing, the
correct way to wash the body was recast by sanitarians from the public bath to the
private domestic shower, which was in turn promoted by the federal government.

C O N C LU SIO N S

In 1850 bathhouses and open-air bathing sites were well attended throughout
Mexico, and swimming was a popular pastime for many Mexicans. After that, how-
ever, new sources of groundwater facilitated a grand expansion of these activities.
In Mexico City, swimming pools and bathhouses opened in new neighborhoods
along the Paseo de la Reforma, where bathing took on a modern, cosmopolitan
air. Chapultepec Park itself had a swimming pool and bathhouse. Social bathing
for fun and fitness grew in popularity and many new businesses were opened that
offered new watery experiences: saunas and steambaths, hot springs and swim-
ming pools.
This was a significant shift in the encounter that people had with waters: from
steaming and washing to soaking and showering. There was a cultural resigni-
fication of cleanliness, which was increasingly defined in terms of hygiene and
linked to concepts of civilization and progress. The temazcal was cast aside as a
tradition practiced by poor and indigenous people, and new bathing practices
 Groundwater and Hydraulic Opulence    89

Figure 7. El Pozo “Pimentel,” La “Colonia de la Condesa.” El Mundo Ilustrado 2, no. 12 (1906).

With permission of the Hemeroteca Nacional de México, Fondo Reservado.

of immersion—and even more so, showering—came to be seen as modern and

desirable. Sidney Mintz calls this “extensification,” a cultural process in which the
poor emulate the practices of the wealthy.110 But just when the humble residents
of the capital gained access to bathhouses, the rich built private bathrooms in
90    chapter 5

their homes, which became commonplace in the bourgeois colonias such as the
Roma and the Condesa that expanded on the western side of the city. This shift
was enabled by groundwater: the Condesa neighborhood was supplied only by
artesian wells when building began around 1905.111
During the twentieth century, the expansion of urban water systems increasingly
provided water to household bathrooms as well as collective bathhouses. Newly
built hydraulic infrastructure was considered evidence of both Mexico’s status as
a civilized nation and the power and authority of the Mexican state.112 After the
Xochimilco aqueduct was completed around 1910, houses in the new neighbor-
hoods in the wealthy areas of Mexico City were connected to the city water grid and
plumbed for showers, a trend that would continue through the twentieth century.
Groundwater is of course not limitless, and the boom of artesian wells was relatively
brief—1850 to 1900, more or less. Nevertheless, the groundwater boom produced
habits of water use that, even after the aquifers were depleted and the artesian wells
trickled out, lived on to motivate the ceaseless twentieth-century drive to build ever-
more-encompassing works to supply universal, frequent, individualized household
baths with uniform, public water.
 6

Chemistry, Biology, and the

Heterogeneity of Modern Waters

Scholars of water argue that large-scale public water systems built with new engi-
neering techniques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created
“new water”—uniform, homogeneous, and public.1 What is not often remembered,
however, is that the creation of new water depended on a continuing appraisal of
the heterogeneity and specificity of waters. In building public works, engineers
had to confront the specific details of particular water sources, such as location,
origin, flow rate, mineral content, and other variables. Chemists and biologists
working to ensure that public water met uniform health standards needed to iden-
tify and measure the biological and mineral contents of these waters. Although
the groundwater that supplied the bathhouses of Mexico was not hot, not highly
mineralized, and did not spring to the surface by itself, it was nevertheless incor-
porated into existing classifications of those kinds of waters, in recognition of its
specificity and its relation to other waters. Scientists analyzed the mineral con-
tents of artesian wellwaters, constructed theories about their geological origins,
looked for microbes, and reached the conclusion that they were perfectly suitable
for inclusion in homogeneous public water.
Ideas about the heterogeneity of waters also evolved due to important develop-
ments within science. At first, those who studied water were mostly chemists, but
after about 1860, biologists equipped with more powerful microscopes identified
organisms that caused diseases that were previously thought to derive from the
waters themselves, or from the gases that emanated from them.2 With the rise
of bacteriology, it became evident that cholera, yellow fever, malaria, and other
diseases did not result from physical aspects of the climate, environment, and
geology, but rather from organisms that grew in water. Hygiene and sanitation in
public health squared off against these bacteria, in an effort to sterilize and sanitize
91
92    chapter 6

public water. In this process of creating and imposing uniform standards for pub-
lic water, the virtues of heterogeneous waters were sometimes forgotten.
But they were not forgotten for long. Despite the expansion of infrastruc-
ture and the shift to biological understandings of health and disease, the idea of
a homogeneous, “public” water never completely dominated, neither in popular
nor scientific minds. Mexico’s medical community was filled with pharmacists
and chemists who continued to research the content and therapeutic qualities
of Mexico’s many waters, and in particular, its groundwater and mineral springs.
Leopoldo Río de la Loza was a central figure in the resilience of physical-chemical
approaches to water and health, who, from his chair in the National Academy of
Medicine and National School of Medicine, directed research and trained genera-
tions of scholars. One of his students, Eduardo Liceaga, pioneered bacteriological
approaches to health in Mexico, introducing vaccinations and addressing out-
breaks of yellow fever through quarantine. Liceaga rose in prominence to direct
the National Health Council and other medical institutions during the ascent of
bacteriology, but he maintained a deep interest in the therapeutic uses of waters,
especially the physiological effects of baths and showers, and he promoted research
on bathing at the National School of Medicine, at the National General Hospital
that he designed and built, and at the mineral hot springs of Peñón de los Baños.
The same economic growth that spurred the construction of infrastructure
and bathhouses in the Porfiriato also promoted the development of hot springs
and mineral springs into medical facilities and business. Even though hot springs
bathhouses such as Peñón fell into decay during the early Republican period,
most Mexicans continued to hold deep-seated beliefs about the medical benefits
of mineral water bathing. The idea that bathing in and drinking mineral waters
was medicinal and therapeutic enjoyed a resurgence with the popular “hydropa-
thy” movement in the 1840s and again, in a more elite scientific form, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even with the rising hegemony of bacte-
riology. A new bathhouse was built at Peñón, and Liceaga himself opened a bath-
house in Villa de Guadalupe. Furthermore, as the nineteenth century progressed,
relaxation and recreation were added to the benefits ascribed to water therapy.3 So
while uniform public water consolidated its presence in Mexico after 1850, it was
accompanied by a booming science and business of heterogeneous waters.

T H E S C I E N C E O F G R OU N DWAT E R : C H E M I ST RY A N D
B IO L O G Y I N BA L A N C E

By the 1850s the rush was on in Mexico City to drill for water. The boom of artesian
wells raised geological questions about groundwater. Where was it located? How
did it flow? Was it connected to surface water? Sebastián Pane and his partner D.
Augustin Molteni provided material from one of the first well bores to Leopoldo
Río de la Loza, a chemist who studied waters, so that he could sketch the strata
underlying the Valley of Mexico.4 The Ildefonso brothers and Ignacio Ortiz de
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    93

Zarate did the same when they opened a well at the Casa de la Moneda, just off the
Zocalo in 1871.5 Technological improvements allowed engineers to discover ever-
deeper water-bearing strata—at 52 meters in 1858, 105 meters in 1863, and up to 234
meters below the surface in the case of the well sunk by Carlos Pérez Rívas near the
Military Hospital. Wells sunk far from the city center encountered the same strata as
those outlined by the geological studies, but at different depths.6 These wells usually
tapped the third aquifer from the surface, which according to Río de la Loza held the
best quality water, but deeper and shallower ones were also commonly used.
Because of artesian wells, the water supply almost doubled by 1858; by 1883 it
almost tripled.7 At the same time, however, aquifer water was an unknown sub-
stance, and there was no information about where it came from, how much there
was, its mineral content and quality, its relation to surface waters, or the effects
of extracting it from the ground. No one knew if it was safe to drink. Mexico
City’s varied waters had always been conceived of as unique, their qualities associ-
ated with the places they emerged. The springs of Santa Fe were “softer,” “lighter,”
and “thinner” than the springs at Chapultepec; the springs in the Desierto de
los Leones were found to be even purer, more “crystalline.” Well-drilling in the
1850s introduced new waters into the lives of Mexicans, but where did the artesian
waters come from, and how did they compare to the known waters?
Noel Coley and others have shown that the modern disciplines of chemistry
and medicine were formed to a significant degree through the analysis and rep-
lication of mineral waters, and this can be seen in Mexico as well.8 How scien-
tists approached the question of health and water changed dramatically between
when the first artesian well was drilled around 1850 and the completion of the
Xochimilco springs aqueduct in 1910, due to a conceptual paradigm shift ush-
ered in by the identification of microorganisms and their linkage to fermenta-
tion, putrefaction, foul smells, and disease. For millennia health had been seen
as an organism’s relation to the qualities and elements in its environment (“airs,
waters, places,” in the climatology established by Hippocrates).9 Waters were ani-
mate; they had agencies that were described as “virtues” inherent to them. The
science of chemistry reshaped this idea by isolating the efficacious chemical ele-
ments in the water that generated pathologies and therapies, and recasting the
water itself as an inert medium. When, around 1880, the understanding of health
moved toward the presence or absence of harmful microscopic organisms in the
environment, the material agency of waters was reassigned to the organisms, fur-
ther robbing the waters themselves of agency. Despite this, the view of water as an
inanimate, uniform medium for biological agents never took complete hold. In
fact, water culture in Mexico was remarkably conservative, retaining the ancient
focus on the relation between bodies and local environments. Even while microbi-
ology changed understandings of health and hygiene, doctors and laypeople con-
tinued to view mineral waters as important agents of well-being.
The shifting coexistence of medical scientific paradigms is exemplified
in the work of two of Mexico’s most important scientists in the nineteenth
94    chapter 6

century: Leopoldo Río de la Loza (1807–1876) and Eduardo Liceaga (1839–1920).

Leopoldo Río de la Loza was a chemist and professor at the National School of
Medicine. Born into a family of chemists, his studies of chemistry and medicine
in the university launched him on a successful career as an academic. At the same
time, he founded a number of chemical factories and came to own three pharma-
cies, or boticas: “La Portacoeli,” “La Botica de Vanegas,” and “La Merced.” Boticas
often sold mineral waters and the salts that were derived from them as treatments,
and some chemists and pharmacists replicated those in their laboratories. L.
Pauer, for example, produced copies of mineral waters from Vichy, Spa, Carlsbad,
and other famed European watering places in the Botica del Refugio, on Espiritu
Santo street in downtown Mexico City.10
Río de la Loza was part of this process of the constitution of science far from
Europe. He was instrumental in compiling the Farmacopea Mexicana (1846) and
the Nueva Farmacopea Mexicana (1874), both with long sections of recipes for
mineral and medicinal waters. He conducted numerous studies of waters during
the mid- and late nineteenth century that were aimed at identifying the hygienic
and therapeutic effects of waters in Mexico. In 1840 he published a study of the
effects of lead pipes on water quality in Mexico City; in 1844 he was called upon
to do an analysis of the waters of Peñón de los Baños and later published a study
of the mineral waters of Atotonilco.11 In 1847 he was commissioned to study the
Xacopinca spring; in 1858 and 1863 he published analyses of artesian wells. In 1869
he served on the Comisión Sobre las Aguas Potables de Mexico, and later pub-
lished a study of springs and potable water in Teotihuacan.12 He was a member of
the Sanitation Board (Junta de Sanidad) of Mexico City, and later of the National
Health Council (Consejo Superior de Salubridad), the independence-period heir
to the colonial police of public health.13
Río de la Loza led the geological and chemical study of groundwater in mid-nine-
teenth-century Mexico. He quickly developed a close relationship with Sebastián
Pane, describing his drill as the “exploratory probe” for his studies. In October 1858,
at the beginning of the boom in artesian wells, Pane sank a well at #2 Calle de
Santa Catarina, northwest of the Zocalo. Río de la Loza and fellow chemist Ernesto
Craveri studied the soils extracted by the drill, compared them to samples from
other wells drilled at that time, and generated an image of the geological formations
underlying Mexico City. “Because of this information,” they wrote, “we believe that
in this valley, at the depth of fifty meters more or less, there are three strata of water
that have the conditions necessary for supplying artesian wells.”14 They concluding
that each of these aquifers held its own kind of water, hydrostatic pressure of these
aquifers varied, and depending on their depth the artesian wells produced between
720 and 2,880 barrels of water each day.15 Río de la Loza’s geological studies helped
promote the assumption of opulence of groundwater, for while many at the time
assumed that the water from the new artesian wells would run out, he declared with
scientific certainty that the artesian wells were “permanent.”16
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    95

Another pressing question about artesian wells concerned public health and the
chemical composition of the waters. Would they harm? Could they heal? When the
first artesian wells in Mexico City bubbled forth, these strange new waters were not
well received by the wealthy households they served. People claimed that the artesian
water upset their stomachs and made their hair fall out. Some of the first wells pro-
duced salty water because the engineers did not prevent surface water from mixing
with that drawn from deeper aquifers. City dwellers complained that water from
some of the wells, such as those on the Calle de Los Cordobanes (today, Calle de las
Donceles) and the Aduana (today, Calle 5 de Febrero), was “azufrosa” (sulfurous) or
“hedionda” (stinky), because of a sulfurous smell that reminded them of hot springs.17
Río de la Loza and Craveri were commissioned by Pane and the Chamber of
Industry of Mexico City to determine the healthfulness of artesian waters and
compare them to others in the Valley of Mexico. Like the mass of people without
scientific training—often referred to by scientists as the “vulgo”—scientists in 1850
began with the assumption of miasmatic theory that foul smells in air or water
were bad for health, and understood these miasmas in terms of chemistry and
climate, not microbes or bacteria.18 The artesian wellwater smelled badly, and Río
de la Loza sought to identify the minerals that caused the smell and to understand
their effects on the “economy” of the body.
Río de la Loza concluded that the artesian waters were better for the health of
the public than others in the Valley. The sulfurous smell that people noted was actu-
ally a harmless gaseous hydrocarbon that would lessen over the life of the well, and
would evaporate from the water if left standing. Popular ideas that groundwater
caused people’s hair to fall out were simply unscientific and wrong. “When some
inhabitants of Mexico City,” he wrote in 1863, “who are used to drinking the so-
called ‘thin’ water [agua delgada], change it for the ‘thick’ [agua gorda], their diges-
tion will suffer for a few days, more or less.”19 His analysis showed that the “thick
water” had more dissolved minerals than groundwater, and argued that it was the
calcium and magnesium, as well as the salts, that caused these digestive problems.
But, he argued, the artesian wells produced clean water with relatively little dis-
solved minerals. Artesian water, Río de la Loza insisted, was not bad for people, and
to protect public health hygienists should instead take aim at social and cultural
factors such as “habits, changes in location and dwelling, etc.”20 Río de la Loza rec-
ommended using water from the third aquifer from the surface, which was of better
quality than the first water-bearing strata that was cheaper to access.21
Río de la Loza was at the forefront of medicine and public health in Mexico
in the mid-nineteenth century. He lived to see John Snow’s discovery in 1854 that
cholera and other diseases were transmitted through London’s groundwater, and
that it was germs rather than miasmatic gases and airs that caused disease. But
he died in 1876, just two years before Pasteur published his landmark study Les
Microbes Organisés, which sparked a hot debate at the 1878 Hygiene Congress in
Mexico City between the established medical tradition and the new adherents to
96    chapter 6

microbiology. Río de la Loza left the National School of Medicine solidly oriented
toward chemical analysis, but in the following decades medicine and public health
would slowly incorporate biology.
This transition can be seen in the life and work of Río de la Loza’s most notable
student, Eduardo Liceaga. Liceaga passed his medical exam in 1866, and went on
to be a leader in science, health, and medicine in Mexico until the twentieth cen-
tury. In 1887 and 1888 he toured the capitals of Europe, visiting hospitals and the
Pasteur Institute in France, and returned to Mexico with materials for vaccinations
against rabies and, having visited sewer and potable water systems, a keen inter-
est in public works, hygiene, and water. He adopted the bacteriological approach
and created modern institutions that characterized health in the twentieth century,
serving twice as president of the National Academy of Medicine. He was an impor-
tant political figure who also held the presidency of the National Health Council,
helped write the 1891 Sanitary Code, oversaw the construction of the National
General Hospital (1905), led the prophylactic effort to identify and quarantine yel-
low fever in Mexico’s port cities, and founded Mexico’s National Bacteriological
Institute in 1905. As the personal doctor of President Porfirio Díaz, who ruled dur-
ing most of the period between 1876 and 1910, his access to power was guaranteed.
Despite Liceaga’s remarkable success in promoting microbiological approaches
to health, there was no moment in the history of medicine in Mexico that marked
an abrupt break from earlier approaches to health that focused on climate and
environment. As Eric Jennings (2006) has shown in his study of hot springs in
France and its colonies, the turn away from climatology was a slow process of
incremental change as centuries-old views of health bent, adapted, but only some-
times broke under the force of the new paradigm of microbiology. According to
Paul Ross (2009), doctors in Porfirian Mexico continued to “explain disease as a
complex relationship between local environmental conditions (especially mias-
mas) and individual predisposition,” rather than a result of tiny organisms.22 So
while Liceaga ushered in the bacteriological approach to health in Mexico, he was
also a leading proponent of therapeutic bathing and mineral waters.
Water continued to be a principal concern of doctors and health officials in
Mexico City. The proliferation of artesian wells in the 1850s and 1860s focused
attention on the quality of groundwater at a time when scientists were still mostly
focused on chemical virtues. The huge increase in water supply generated by these
artesian wells only accentuated the problem of stagnant and noxious waters, which
formed wetlands around uncapped wells and sluggish pools in the city’s drainage
canals. By the 1880s the stench of nearby Lake Texcoco, which received the city’s
effluent, was unbearable to many among the educated elite who, informed by dis-
cussions of hygiene, sought to create a more sanitary city.
In 1882, the National Academy of Medicine commissioned a study of “the
­influence of waters for domestic use on the public health of the Capital.” The result,
Antonio Peñafiel’s Memoria de las Aguas Potables de la Capital de Mexico, shows the
evolving balance between chemistry and biology, and climate and microorganisms,
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    97

in ideas about waters, health, and cleanliness. In that document, chemical analy-
sis was still paramount, but following the emergent emphasis on microbiology the
object of study had turned to the putrefaction of organic material in the water, caused
by the explosive growth of microscopic plants and animals “in the millions.”23 Air,
water, and organic material were the key ingredients for this fermentation, a process
which consumes oxygen and produces carbonic acid and ammonia. Peñafiel fol-
lowed the work of Pasteur, but his analysis of water and health pointed him back to
the chemistry of waters—to the presence of carbonic acid and ammonia as identi-
fiable markers of infection in the waters of the Valley of Mexico. “Pasteur has not
finished building his theory, but we can seize on the most prominent and visible
results of these vital, chemical actions,” Peñafiel suggested.24 He offered a discus-
sion of microscopic analysis of bacteria in water, but in practice gauged the relative
chemical purity of waters in the Valley of Mexico by the presence or absence of mac-
roscopic living organisms such as fish and snails. The microbiology of contagion
was still something of a black box in Peñafiel’s climatological method and theory.
While climatological perspectives may have held their own in discussions of
potable water between 1880 and 1920, they actually grew in prominence overall
due to their role in the dramatic growth of the business of bathing. Water was
neither just the medium through which microbiological threats to public health
came into contact with people, nor the substance that could be used to wash those
threats away. Waters themselves were increasingly considered crucial for both
hygiene and therapy among doctors and the public, despite the emergence of
homogeneous public water. This resurgence of the conceptual specificity and mul-
tiplicity of waters, and of the notion that waters were agents in a climatologically
informed health system, unfolded in the practices and places of the bath.

BAT H I N G F O R H E A LT H : T H E R A P Y A N D H YG I E N E

“There is nothing like water; it will cure all complaints but poverty, and heal all
wounds but sorrow! Do you find yourself afflicted in mind, melancholy, or disposed
not to hear mass? Drink water, and bathe yourself in the river. Are you stung by a
scorpion? Bathe the wound in water: and for the bite of a rattlesnake it is equally
efficacious. I am sixty-nine years of age, and for 35 of these I have been a water
carrier; and during the whole of that time I have preserved my health by drinking
water! There is nothing like water for the head or toothache. Warm water however
swells the stomach; but cold water, that is the thing—used three times, it is a rem-
edy for soul and body: for coughs, colds, rheums, colic, and in short every other
complaint whatsoever, a liquor for angels to drink with pleasure and advantage.”
—Water carrier, Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, 1829

Source: Hardy 1829: 497.

98    chapter 6

During the Porfiriato, artesian groundwater and the idea of hydraulic opulence
encouraged the massification of bathing for cleanliness as well as social and ludic
ends, but many people continued to treat maladies with water. As we have seen,
the quality of the particular water was often seen to be the curing agent, and water
cures employed the entire range of waters, from pure, fresh springwaters to the
most heavily mineralized hot springs, as well as seawater.25 Each of these waters
was thought to have particular properties that made it useful for treating certain
diseases. Hot springs were especially important, and the study of hot springs in
the late eighteenth century and nineteenth centuries was focused on generating
classifications for the mineral contents of those springs and their utility in treating
different conditions. The physical action of water on the body was also thought to
have therapeutic effects, and a plethora of showers, baths, and drinking schedules
were designed to apply water to different parts of the body. For these applications,
the content of the water was not as important, and the showers, baths, and other
applications utilized whatever water source was at hand.
Therapeutic bathing was practiced in different forms by ordinary folks across
Mexico. In the 1820s medical doctor Robert Hardy toured northern and western
Mexico, and reported with ethnographic detail on regionally specific popular cus-
toms and ideas about water. Hot springs were considered by people in northern
Mexico to be curative, but bathing in cold waters was not.26 In Sonora, snakebites
were washed with cold water, while immersion was seen to be harmful for people
with colds. Those with smallpox and measles stopped washing altogether for forty
days. When Hardy ordered a bath for a sick young girl, her father swore that “he
had not closed his eyes during the whole night, as he thought it was not pos-
sible that his daughter should survive the washing.”27 The doctor remarked that in
this region there was “a kind of superstitious awe felt by the natives in regard to
ablutions.”28 On the other hand, in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, water was promoted
as something of a cure-all, at least by a man selling the water. This same strong
idea of the beneficial virtues of water was observed fifteen years later in Lagos
by Albert Gilliam, who wrote that the patient “was directed first to bathe seven
times, and that afterwards [the doctor] gave him some roots, of which he made
teas to drink.”29 Like Hardy, Gilliam considered this to be “superstition” rather
than science.
Popular water cures were influenced by transnational trends in medicinal
water culture, as was the idea held by others that these cures were unscientific.
The “hydropathy” of Vincent Priessnitz was especially influential. Priessnitz was
an Austrian with no medical training who established a treatment center on his
farm in 1826. He practiced a regime of coldwater showers and wraps, together
with a diet of simple regional food, which by 1840 had become famous enough
to attract visitors from all ranks of society, and from as far away as England and
the United States.30 Soon hydropathic treatment centers were popping up around
Europe and the Americas. Alistair Durie shows how these “hydros,” with their
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    99

abstemious and ascetic qualities, gained adherents among a middle class that
turned away from the perceived decadence of spas.31
Hydropathy also gathered followers in Mexico during the 1840s and 1850s.
But in addition to the idea that it was a more respectable water cure than the
spa, Mexican proponents of hydropathy argued it was more popular and demo-
cratic. The hydropathic regimen utilized cold, pure water flowing directly from the
source for bathing and drinking.32 According to this perspective, pharmaceuticals
were damaging; no other substance than cold pure water was medicinal, not even
mineral water.33 In Europe at that time, public access to hot springs was increas-
ingly restricted by the doctors who made their business with them. Hydropathy
encouraged people to make their own cure, as cold water, unlike hot or mineral
water, was universally available. In the 1840s hydropathy enjoyed a wave of pop-
ularity in Guanajuato, Guadalajara, Silao, Morelia, and Mexico City, promoted
by Emeterio Sáez de Heredia and José Nogueras, both priests from overseas.34 It
became so popular in Guadalajara that 150 citizens petitioned the city government
to formally endorse the treatment.35
Hydropathy was fiercely debated and hydropaths were pitted against the sci-
entific medical industry. Emeterio Sáez explicitly avoided scientific language in
an effort to “be understood by the poor and ignorant.”36 Instead, he presented his
water cure in religious terms reminiscent of studies of mineral springs from the
eighteenth century in Spain and Mexico.37 While popular notions of health were
still rooted in this language, by the mid-nineteenth century it had been purged
from scientific discourse, a turn strengthened further by growing Liberal anticleri-
calism during the late 1840s and 1850s. Sáez attacked scientific medicine, fulminat-
ing against the “ambition of glory and fortune” that motivated doctors. He argued
that the medical profession attacked hydropathy because it “robbed them of their
science . . . the pharmacist trembles, fearing for his business and his drugs.”38 José
Nogueras, also a priest, echoed this therapeutic populism when he told his readers
“do not expect the flowery language of the classroom, nor the elegant style com-
mon in prologues: I will speak to everybody, following the path of nature.”39
Medical doctors rejected hydropathy as a “vulgar,” empirical approach that
lacked scientific theory of disease and knowledge of anatomy, and they labeled its
proponents “charlatans.”40 At the behest of doctor Juan Manuel González Urueña,
José Nogueras was ordered by the government of the City of Mexico to stop prac-
ticing hydropathy, although Nogueras later got the federal government to lift the
ban. While most doctors in Mexico looked upon those who practiced hydropathy
to be quacks, they were at the same time careful to recognize “hydrotherapy,” or
the scientific use of water in medicine, as legitimate.41 At stake was the concep-
tual and practical system by which water was applied to medical ends, not the
status of water as a useful substance for medicine. As a result of the hydropathy
episode, however, Mexican doctors turned away from water treatments until the
1870s, when the Military Hospital, the Hospital de San Lucas, and some of the
100    chapter 6

Figure 8. “Shower, Fleury Design.” Lugo 1875: 17.

Mexico City bathhouses installed showers modeled on Louis Fleury’s equipment

in his baths at Bellevue-chez-Meudon, France.42 Therapeutic bathing was further
institutionalized in the National School of Medicine, where numerous theses were
produced on the topic between 1875 and 1910. All of these hydrotherapeutic show-
ering and bathing facilities utilized the waters of the public water system, irrespec-
tive of their origin in the Chapultepec springs, the springs of the Desierto de los
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    101

Leónes, the new pozos artesianos, or the Xochimilco springs. In these versions of
hydrotherapy it was the physical force of the water, more than its mineral content,
that was considered curative.
Interest in the therapeutic qualities of mineral springs never died. The medi-
cal history of mineral waters in Mexico has been ignored by historians who focus
instead on the botanical elements of medicine, but we know that scientists and
doctors did work on these extraordinary waters.43 The Royal Botanical Expedition
to Mexico in the 1790s carried out studies of the waters of Cuincho and San
Bartolomé, and Jardín Botánico director Vicente Cervantes extracted the miner-
als from them by evaporation.44 In 1795 Antonio De la Cal y Bracho, who took
Cervantes’s 1792 course on botánica and became the correspondent in Puebla for
the Real Expedición, carried out an identical study of the mineral waters and local
plants of Tehuacán.45 Although he did not further explore the place of the “reino
mineral” in Mexico’s national popular-medicine tradition, focusing instead on
botánica, he clearly defined the need for further studies of mineral springs.46
In 1850 most hot springs in Mexico were rustic and undeveloped, and the bath-
houses that did exist dated to the colonial era. Regardless, people in Mexico con-
tinued to utilize hot springs for bathing, drinking, and even inhaling cures. In 1844
Ernesto Masson lambasted the 1790 remodel of Peñón, saying that “everything
about the place reveals the poor taste of the era.”47 But this was also his dismissal of
the everyday folks who kept the baths “in vogue” throughout the years, and their
“vulgar” ideas about the medicinal properties of the waters. The humble used the
bathhouse, and the very poor simply took half-baths sitting in the drainage canal
outside of the bathhouse.48 Masson notes that while the Mexican elite was develop-
ing an interest in scientific therapeutic bathing, this did not result in improvements
in Peñón and greater use of the waters. The rebuilding of Peñón may have been
frustrated by the inheritance dispute discussed in chapter 3, but elites did not travel,
as their European counterparts did massively throughout the nineteenth century,
to any other hot springs until around 1890, when hot springs bathhouses were built
in Aguascalientes, Tehuacán, and Topo Chico.
Those who sought out and wrote about Mexican mineral springs were often
foreigners who had experience with European health spas. In 1835 Francesco
Antomarchi, Napoléon Bonaparte’s last doctor in Corsica, lived for a brief period
in Mexico and visited a number of hot springs: Xochitepec (Morelos), Atotonilco
de Santa Cruz (Zacatecas), Ojocaliente (San Luis Potosí), and “Agua de San
Ramón” (Aguascalientes). Antomarchi, who would die in Santiago, Cuba, in 1838,
was ill at that time, and it is likely that he was searching for a cure. Just a day’s travel
south of Mexico City, the Atotonilco springs were hemmed by a masonry wall
that formed a pool where men and women bathed together. In Ojocaliente there
were two well-kept bathhouses attached to the pool, one for each sex. Antomarchi
conducted the customary analysis of the waters of each—temperature, chemical
content—and derived a determination of their usefulness for treating different
102    chapter 6

medical conditions.49 Regino Gayuca, who transcribed this report in 1843 for the
journal of the National Museum of Mexico, wondered why “if in many parts of
Europe they value thermal waters and have identified their minerals, we hardly
mention those that we have in this America?”50 Aguascalientes had been known
for its curative hot springs since its foundation in the sixteenth century, and
Antomarchi, together with a group of local intellectuals, conducted an analysis of
the waters of the San Ramón springs.51 None of these springs attracted the interest
of cosmopolitan urbanites, and none were developed into bathing establishments
until the 1880s.
Any mention of hot springs by proponents of therapeutic bathing was inevitably
followed by dejected comparisons to the advanced state of installations and prac-
tices elsewhere. In 1840 Francis Erskine (Fanny) Calderón de Vaca visited Peñón
de los Baños, told of its decrepit state, and offered a vision of the thriving business
that could be built at the site by an “enterprising Yankee.” Between 1844 and 1849
Ernesto Masson, a naturalized French immigrant, carried on a heated debate in
Mexico City’s press with the goal of improving the state of the Peñón baths, which
was mired in an inheritance dispute, so that patients could make use of its “aston-
ishing virtues.”52 He lobbied the city government to expropriate Peñón and sell it to
Anselmo Zurutuza, who promised to build “a European-style thermal bathhouse.”53
Ramón Malo, governor of the Distrito Federal (DF), ordered the National Health
Council to study Peñón and identify its medical benefits, in the model of countless
other hot springs studies, and Leopoldo Río de la Loza and Ernesto Craveri pub-
lished their report in 1849. By then, however, the DF had a new governor, Pedro
Jorrín, who did not care enough about Peñón de los Baños to proceed further.
In 1858 a similar study was carried out in the mineral springs of Tehuacán,54 and
Peñón’s waters were analyzed again a few decades later in Paris,55 but the springs
and their ancient bathhouses did not receive investment by developers.
Mexico’s pharmacists, however, did make a business of mineral waters. Whereas
the 1846 Farmacopea Mexicana included water as a medium for preparing herbal
infusions (agua de azahar, agua de canela, agua de hinojo, etc.), the Nueva
Farmacopea Mexicana published in 1874 included an appendix on “Waters” with
chapters on potable waters, natural mineral waters, and artificial mineral waters,
the last with recipes for the contents of famous European mineral springs. Included
in this appendix are chemical analyses by Río de la Loza of various Mexican hot
springs, as well as by Baguerisse and Lambert. Mineral waters had become part
of Mexican modernizing medicine, and Mexican doctors and pharmacists were
influenced by the growing role of hot mineral waters in European medicine. For
example, Plácido Díaz’s 1876 study of the hot springs in Puebla pointed to their
usefulness in treating tuberculosis, an analysis that built on the European tradition
of treating that disease with fresh air and mineral springs.56 In 1878 the Mexican
National Academy of Medicine announced a competition to study Mexico’s min-
eral water, indicating the resurgence of mineral waters in medicine at the time.
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    103

José Lobato won the contest with a comparative analysis of the springs in Villa de
Guadalupe and Peñón de los Baños.57 The competition was one of two about water
that were announced in 1874: Antonio Peñafiel won the other with his treatise on
potable waters.58
Lobato announced the victory of scientific medicine over “vulgar,” “empirical”
traditions of hydrotherapy, writing that “little by little the belief in the therapeutic
effects of mineral waters has turned into a scientific doctrine, and that this has
become known to all social classes in the civilized countries of Europe, America,
Asia, etc.”59 Lobato’s analysis and classification of the mineral waters was based
in European models, but he adjusted them to grapple with the specificities of the
mineral waters in Mexico. In doing this Lobato built upon the tradition of studying
the chemical and mineral qualities of water that was developed by Río de la Loza.
He privileged the geological origins of the waters in his classification, complement-
ing the therapeutic orderings proposed by French scholars and doctors Etienne
Ossian Henry, Maxime Durand-Fardel, and Jules Lefort. Lobato established seven
families, fourteen classes, fifty-seven genders, and a scattering of species of mineral
waters in his system, all according to their chemical composition and geological
origins.60 The therapeutic agency of a water, described in the eighteenth century as
its “virtue,” was recast as a “medicinal, mineralogical principle that gives expres-
sion to a medical power.”61 This science did not rid waters of their efficacy.

S T RU G G L I N G T OWA R D SPA S

In the 1870s, mineral springs in the Valley of Mexico were converted into bath-
houses, part of the wider profusion of bathing at the time. The hot springs bath-
house of Peñón de los Baños languished in a rudimentary state, but bathhouses
were built at two sources of ferruginous (iron-bearing; also known as “chalybeate”)
waters to the north of the historic center. The spring at Aragón was located on the
side of the road leading into the religious center of Guadalupe. The owner of the
land was prompted by the rising popularity of bathing in the 1870s to unearth the
spring, which until then had been considered a nuisance. He commissioned an
analysis of the waters by the chemist Gumersindo Mendoza, and built a bathhouse
in 1875 with a few placeres in small private rooms, a garden, and a ten-by-ten-
meter swimming pool.62 Soon a steady stream of patients treated anemia and other
maladies with the iron-rich waters. The other mineral water baths near Guadalupe
were named the “La Estación,” and were located a few steps from the station of the
train that brought visitors from Mexico. Eduardo Liceaga built that bathhouse in
1878, supplying it with an artesian well perforated by the Beléndez and Velázquez
company. It had six “first class” rooms with placeres, a bottling room, a gynecologi-
cal treatment room, a room of showers, a garden and more, and was designed in
the neoclassical style of a Pompeian villa similar to that of the bathhouse in the
Bosque de Chapultepec.
Figure 9. El Pocito, Villa de Guadalupe. Michaud 1874. With permission of Universidad
­ acional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Archivo Fotográfico
N
Manuel Toussaint, Colección Julio Michaud.
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    105

These bathhouses were built with clear scientific medical justifications. Never­
theless, they both served a clientele that was drawn to Guadalupe by the religious
fame of the mineral waters of the nearby Pocito, a spring that became a Christian
holy site in the sixteenth century and was considered to mark the site of the appear-
ance in 1531 of the Virgin de Guadalupe to Juan Diego. People considered the waters
to be “miraculous” and curative, and the crowds that came to drink and bathe were
so great that the church erected a structure around the spring in 1648, and in the
1770s built a baroque chapel (see figures 9 and 24). The spring welled up in a two-
meter receptacle inside the chapel, with a grate on it that prevented people from
climbing in to bathe. A copper cup on a chain was attached to the grate so that pil-
grims could drink the waters. Río de la Loza analyzed the waters of the Pocito and
argued that they were more effective than similar springs in Europe, and far better
than the patent medicines being produced at the time.63 He found the waters of La
Estación and Aragón to be similar but not identical in their mineral composition.
Lobato judged most Mexican bathhouses woefully underdeveloped in compar-
ison to the spas of Europe. He decried the failure to institute medical hydrotherapy
in terms of science and tradition, but was aware that this had a lot to do with
social class. A major obstacle to the development of modern bourgeois bathing
was the “routine of tradition” that governed the therapeutic use of these waters.
Most bathhouses served humble clients who had, for centuries, made the pilgrim-
age to Guadalupe for the miraculous properties of the waters, but who could not
afford, nor were interested in, expensive and lavish facilities. Bathhouses, Lobato
argued, should be run by doctors and trained managers, much like textile fac-
tories should be run by directors and mechanics.64 These doctors and managers
should be schooled in the latest science in order to deal with the complexity of the
mineral content and temperatures of the waters and their application to a variety
of maladies through a variety of systems: tubs, showers, inhalation devices, etc.
Empiricism and routine—the heart of popular medical traditions—prevented the
implementation of more sophisticated and effective mineral water therapies.
Both business and government needed to intervene, Lobato argued. The two
bathhouses in Guadalupe were attracting visitors from Mexico City, but neither
was adequately capitalized, and hotels, guesthouses, doctors’ offices, restaurants,
and other amenities common to the European spa towns such as Vichy were com-
pletely lacking. While the business of bathing might not be rewarding, baths were
also a service offered to the public, and the meagerness of profits should not deter
Mexican investors from building first-rate spas where scientific medicine could
flourish. Government needed to help as well. Mexico City’s Distrito Federal had
no medical inspector to oversee hydrotherapy treatments; there were no doctors
attending to the sick at the bathhouses. The Consejo de Salubridad, Lobato argued,
needed to treat mineral waters as a public health issue. “In our country,” he stated,
“we still today have no knowledge of the regulations of sanitary police that are
required for bathing establishments of this kind.”65
106    chapter 6

Figure 10. “Misting apparatus for pulverizing mineral waters in the inhalation departments
of the baths.” Lobato 1884: insert between pp. 192 and 193.

While in the late eighteenth century the ruling class policed the sexuality and
sociality of plebian bathing, for Lobato policing was needed primarily to counter-
act the weight of popular medical traditions: empiricism, folk knowledge, religious
beliefs. “Take a look at the buildings in Aragón and Guadalupe, on the one hand,
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    107

and Peñón, on the other, and you will see that they are none other than common
baths, fitting for a population that has little civilization, scientifically and socially
speaking.”66 There was the lack of mass appeal for bourgeois scientific bathing prac-
tices and bathhouses, and crowds still administered their own treatments at Peñón,
despite its decrepit state, because of the widely held idea that they were useful for
treating rheumatism and infertility among women. Lobato dismissed the plebeian
bathing tradition as superstitious “empiricism” that eroded the prestige of those
hot springs among scientists. The mass appeal of the Pocito de Guadalupe was
due, he argued, to the fact that “the Spaniards made indigenous converts believe
that the spring is miraculous and supernatural.”67 So strong was the belief in the
holy, curative powers of the waters that faithful craftsmen and even elite matriarchs
donated their Sundays to building the chapel in the 1770s—no labor was hired.68
And this was the root of the issue: the reforming mineral water doctor was promot-
ing a water culture that was not shared by almost anybody else in Mexico.

“Mexican mineral hydrotherapy is destined to figure notably in the annals of

science.”
—José Lobato, 1884

Source: Lobato 1884: ix.

Porfirian scientists often complained about a lack of basic science concerning

mineral waters, but by 1886 there were already analyses of 116 different Mexican
mineral springs.69 The same impression of paucity was shared by French colleague
Emile Delacroix, whose 1876 study of the world’s mineral waters mentioned Peñón
and Guadalupe, but found that the curative properties of their waters were yet to
be properly classified.70 Clearly there were long-standing traditions of taking the
waters among everyday Mexicans, but in the early 1880s Mexico did not have a
robust enough bourgeoisie with modern Europeanized concepts of health, medi-
cine, and leisure to support investment in mineral water spa establishments such as
those in France and Germany. As Friedrich Semeleder, former doctor to Emperor
Maximiliano and Empress Carlota and a member of the Mexican Academy of
Medicine, put it, “in Mexico there is not the same kind of mania for mineral waters
that there is in Europe.”71
Some doctors and politicians rejected the Eurocentrism of spa medicine, fram-
ing their project instead in terms of the specificity of Mexican bodies and environ-
ments, a nationalist, climatological strain of thought with precursors in the late
eighteenth century. In 1886 the National Academy of Medicine, “mortified” by the
idea that Europeans would hold more interest in their hot springs then they did,
approved a national-level study of Mexico’s mineral waters with the purpose of
108    chapter 6

generating scientific information to support medical applications and the devel-

opment of spas.72 In 1889, Carlos Pacheco, Minister of Development, created the
National Institute of Medicine (NIM), with the mandate to “possess truths discov-
ered in this country, and perhaps in some cases only applicable to this country.”73
At the same time a major survey was conducted by the Ministry of Development
to collect climatological information from the 2,863 municipalities of Mexico, an
interest that was shared by Liceaga.74

“If, because of our climate, geography, race and customs we have a different phys-
iology, idiosyncrasy, morbid receptivity, and constitution; if our fauna, our flora
and our waters are not the fauna, flora and waters of other places: why, then, if
we have such varied national elements, have we not created a national science?”
— Secundino Sosa, 1889

Source: Sosa 1889a: 2.

Pacheco believed in the therapeutic efficacy of water. He was a regular visitor to the
Alberca Pane, where he swam in the pool and used the baths.75 Hydrotherapy was a
central focus of climatological models of health,76 and Pacheco had a special inter-
est in developing both the science and business of mineral springs, which were, in
the words of Secundino Sosa, director and founder of the NIM’s journal El Estudio,
“almost completely abandoned.”77 Over the next two decades the NIM conducted
an ongoing effort to study the country’s waters and “form a hydrological repertoire
with chemical and therapeutic uses.”78 Whereas Lobato called on government and
business to develop Mexico’s mineral waters into spas, Sosa argued that it was the
doctors who had to bring together the science of hydrotherapy, the capital needed
to build spas, and the clients to keep those spas functioning.
Eduardo Liceaga was the kind of doctor that Sosa was interested in; one who
promoted the science as well as the business of bathing in Mexico. He was keenly
interested in the role of water in public health, and pushed therapeutic bathing with
the same conviction that he promoted modern water supply systems and sewers.
Liceaga was born in Guanajuato in 1839 into a family of doctors, and graduated
from the National School of Medicine with honors in 1866; Leopoldo Río de la
Loza was a member of his exam committee. He was at the center of the worldwide
turn to microbiology, visiting the Pasteur laboratory in the 1880s and returning to
Mexico with plans for inoculations against rabies. He served as president of the
Consejo Superior de Salubridad and director of the National School of Medicine
and used these positions to elaborate building and sanitation codes for Mexico
City. He also served twice as president of Mexico’s National Medical Association
and oversaw the construction of the General Hospital.79 Liceaga collaborated with
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    109

Roberto Gayol, a hydraulic engineer who served as assistant director of public

works for the Mexico City government and sat on the Consejo de Salubridad
Pública. Together they designed and built the General Hospital, as well as the city’s
drainage system. The General Hospital, initiated in 1896 and concluded in 1905,
was equipped with a hydrotherapy building that offered a variety of medicinal,
therapeutic, and hygienic encounters with water.80 There was a swimming pool,
Russian baths, Turkish baths, all kinds of showers, nozzles and sprayers for thera-
peutic applications, and cold and warm showers for personal cleanliness modeled
after those used by the French military.81 The complex was supplied by artesian
wells as well as city water and had a robust sewer system.

“That was precisely what [the girls’] mother and Dr. Liceaga sought. By enhanc-
ing the body’s circulation, hydrotherapy bestows on the nervous system—which
is so delicate, so exquisite, and so obedient—a far from negligible amount of what
can be called the joy of living. . .”
—José de Cuéllar, 1941

Source: De Cuéllar 1941: 23–24.

Doctor Liceaga was also deeply involved in the business of therapeutic bathing. He
built “La Estación” bathhouse in 1878 and in 1880 published a study of the different
springwaters of the Villa de Guadalupe.82 A decade later he turned his attention to
a study of the mineral waters of Peñón, commissioned by Manuel Romero Rubio,
secretary of Gobernación and father-in-law of Porfirio Díaz.83 Between 1887 and
1892 Romero built a sumptuous, modern spa at Peñón and Liceaga’s study was, like
all studies of mineral waters, both science and promotion. Liceaga presented it to
the Mexican National Academy of Medicine, and immediately had it translated for
distribution at the 1892 meeting of the American Public Health Association that
he organized in Mexico City.84 Doctor Friedrich Semeleder described the study as
“advantageous even from a financial point of view.”85
The new Peñón bathhouse was as close to a European spa that could be found
in Mexico. The bathhouse itself had two floors, the lower floor with a bathing
area for men, decorated in Egyptian motifs, and one for women in an Aztec style.
This mix of decorative elements from Old World and New World civilizations
evoked the classical, Mediterranean roots of bathing in Mexico, participated in
the Egypt-mania of the time, and by claiming a classical tradition of bathing was
an assertion of Mexico’s place among the world’s civilized countries.86 The bathing
apartments each had a bathtub room and another room where guests could recline
on a bed and sweat. There was a room of showers, a sauna, and fountains of the
mineral water for drinking. On the upper floors there were sumptuously furnished
110    chapter 6

Figure 11. Departamento de Baños, Peñón de los Baños bathhouse. El Mundo Ilustrado 2,
no. 12 (1906). With permission of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Hemeroteca
Nacional de México, Fondo Reservado.

bedrooms and meeting rooms, and nearby buildings held a chapel, a manager’s
quarters, a billiard saloon, a restaurant, and a bowling alley. The building offered
“the most beautiful views of the Valley of Mexico” to aid the rest and recuperation
of the clients.87 President Díaz himself reserved a special suite of rooms for his
family at the spa.88
The new bathhouse was directed primarily at the Porfirian bourgeoisie. Different
“classes and prices” of baths were available, allowing some of the humble folks who
had used the waters before the bathhouse was built to continue to do so, but poor
people no longer had access to the used waters in the exit channel. Liceaga pro-
vided the bourgeois clients with a guide to the rules of behavior at modern spas,
so that the curing properties of the waters were complemented by diet, hygiene,
rest, diversion, and leisure. Patients were advised to “change their habits entirely,”
to leave the stuffy houses and offices behind along with all the excitement and
worries of business, rich food, late nights, alcohol, and “theaters and balls” that
the bourgeoisie was accustomed to. He warned that treatment required prolonged
stays, repeated over many years, and gave more precise instructions about bathing
and drinking to address particular maladies.89
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    111

Figure 12. “Edificios de ‘El Peñón.’” El Mundo Ilustrado 2, no. 12 (1906). With permission of
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Hemeroteca Nacional de México, Fondo Reservado.

At 11:00 a.m. on November 31, 1892, a caravan of horse-drawn coaches rolled up

in a salty, dusty cloud before the sparkling Victorian buildings at Peñón de los
Baños. Two hundred formally dressed men, most of them doctors, made their way
into the brand-new bathhouse and bottling plant situated at the foot of a rocky
outcropping in the dry bed of Lake Texcoco. The physicians were from Mexico
and the United States, and conversed in Spanish, English, and French. They were
met by a cadre of some of the most influential figures in Mexico, including the
owner of the installations, President Porfirio Díaz’s father-in-law, Manuel Romero
Rubio, and Díaz’s personal doctor, Eduardo Liceaga. The foreigners were deeply
impressed to find such a refined and sumptuous establishment, reminiscent of the
luxurious spas of Europe, on the forlorn outskirts of Mexico City. They reviewed
the marble baths, examined the hygienic bottling plant, and strolled through the
richly appointed hotel before making their way back to the coaches for the seven-
kilometer ride to the Castillo de Chapultepec, where they were received in the
Yellow Room by Liceaga and the president of the Republic himself.

Source: Liceaga 1892: 3, “Report” 1893, “American Public Health Association.”

Peñón was one of a small number of hot springs spas built in Mexico during the
Porfiriato. After 1884, the railroad that passed through Aguascalientes brought
visitors to its new bathhouses, and the Topo Chico bathhouse near Monterrey
was erected in the 1890s, together with a solid and elegant hotel (see chapter 7).
112    chapter 6

Porfirio Díaz ordered studies conducted of the springs at Tehuacán, which led to
the development of the Balneario del Riego and other bathhouses.90 As we have
seen in chapter 5, taking the waters in mineral springs was part of a wider upsurge
in bathing and swimming fueled by the perception of hydraulic opulence asso-
ciated with the artesian well. Bathhouses and mineral springs resorts multiplied
over the next fifty years, but hygienic bathing slowly shifted from a public, social
activity to a private, individual one, carried out increasingly within the confines of
people’s homes. Mineral waters bathing remained a social activity, but lost much
of its medical rationale as therapy gave way to leisure as the principal rationale of
the business of bathing.

F R OM BAT H T O SHOW E R

“Hygiene and therapy fight for dominance in hydrology,” Secundino Sosa

announced in 1889.91 In the nineteenth century, chemistry, long the protagonist in
the science of water and public health, slowly ceded ground to biological views of
the importance of microorganisms, marking a similar movement away from treat-
ing bodies by exposing them to minerals in waters, and toward protecting bodies
from the bacteria in the liquid. Liceaga, Lobato, Sosa, and many other Porfirian
doctors held a therapeutic understanding of the efficacy of waters that was based
in chemistry, and sought to promote and profit from European traditions of min-
eral springs bathing. But the new attention to microbiology was changing people’s
relations to water, and to each other. Instead of a medium for mineral treatments,
water increasingly came to be seen as a carrier of contagious microbes. The con-
tradiction between cure and contagion was sharpened by the idea that bathing
could also promote hygiene and health by washing away biological contaminants.
The shower, taken individually, was seized upon as the way to benefit from the
cleansing effect of water while ensuring that the water did not move microbes
from one body to another. Showers produced a constant circulation of water, and
like flushing, appealed to sanitarians preoccupied with stagnation. During the
Porfiriato they were increasingly viewed as the most modern, healthful form of
bathing. In 1885, a traveler in Mexico commented that the “bathhouses with show-
ers, already common in Mexico, are challenging the bathhouses with tubs and
placeres that are so common in this country, where all social classes frequently
bathe.”92 With showers in the public baths, the scene described with horror by
Antonio García Cubas of a poor mother bathing her entire family in the same tub
of water would be erased.93
The resurgent field of hydrotherapy also promoted the displacement of bath-
tubs by showers. Hydrotherapy held that it was the physical action of water on
the body, rather than the minerals of chemicals contained by the water, that was
therapeutic. This viewpoint gained strength from the knowledge that minerals
suspended in water were actually not absorbed by the skin. In Mexico, popular
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    113

hydrotherapy, or hydropathy, had been rejected by many doctors as an empirical,

unscientific practice in the 1840s, but medical students continued to submit the-
ses on “scientific hydrotherapy” for the professional examination at the National
School of Medicine throughout the last half of the century.94 The “heroic method
of cold baths” inherited from the hydropathy of Priessnitz and others enjoyed a
resurgence between 1890 and 1910 in many countries; first Germany and Austria,
then the United States, Mexico, and elsewhere. Columbia University even dedi-
cated a faculty chair to hydrotherapy, the first in the hemisphere.95 Hydrotherapy
was applied by graduates of the National School of Medicine in the new General
Hospital in Mexico City.96 Part of the success of this medical tradition came
from its ability to incorporate the latest scientific discoveries, such as electricity
and radiation.97 In 1901, for example, Samuel Morales opened an ultra-modern
“­electro-medical” bathhouse in Mexico City, offering shock treatments in cold and
hot water baths, dry-shocks, x-rays and massages.98
Following the initial inspiration of Priessnitz in the 1840s, and Fleury in the
1870s (Lugo 1875), hydrotherapists elaborated an increasingly complex array of
hoses and showers to direct water at particular parts of the body. By 1900, such
showers were present in hospitals and baths around the world—the Orthopedic
Hospital in Philadelphia; Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC; Massachusetts
State Hospital in Danvers; and the Riverside Baths in New York City—and were
installed by Eduardo Liceaga at the new General Hospital in Mexico City (1905).
Liceaga also promoted hydrotherapy from his chair at Mexico’s National School
of Medicine.99 The psychiatric hospital “La Castañeda,” opened in 1910, deployed
hydrotherapeutic showers to treat mental and emotional disorders, as did Bellevue
Psychiatric Hospital in New York.
The turn to the hydrotherapeutic shower was a turn away from the bathhouse
culture of the late nineteenth century. Victor Macías-González (2012) shows that
Porfirian bathhouses contained varied social spaces that offered a wide range of
leisure activities, from swimming pools, barbers, and massages to reading rooms
and restaurants, as well as numerous private rooms that facilitated homoerotic
encounters among middle class and elite Mexican men. These bathing estab-
lishments often embraced an imaginary of opulence and leisure associated with
Roman and Turkish baths. But in the face of growing homophobia propelled by
the notorious persecution of the “41” in 1901, bathhouse operators such as the
owner of the San Felipe Baths stressed “order and morality,” limiting physical and
social interactions and focusing activity on the hygienic act of washing quickly in
strictly individualized spaces. The revolution (1910–20) added to this tendency
with a critique of the decadence of the Porfirian bourgeoisie, and the promotion
of ideals of efficiency, action, and heterosexual virility. Revolutionary reformers
in the Departamento de Salubridad lauded the shower as a fast, efficient way to
wash the body that eliminated the sensuality and connotations of homoeroticism
carried by placeres and other immersion baths.100 In the twentieth century, the
114    chapter 6

policing of sociality and sexuality in the bath compelled a transition from immer-
sion to showering.
The extension of hydraulic infrastructure into the household generalized the
shower and individualized bathing. Widespread everyday bathing only became
possible with the opulence of water that began with the artesian wells after 1850.
Bathhouses grew in popularity in the last decades of the nineteenth century,
but this expansion of social bathing was matched after 1910 by private bathing
as huge volumes of new water were delivered by the aqueduct from the springs
of Xochimilco to homes in the growing suburbs along the Paseo de la Reforma.
The Colonia Doctores, Colonia Roma, Colonia Juárez, and Colonia Condesa were
obliged by the 1891 Sanitary Code (passed by Eduardo Liceaga when he directed
the Consejo de Salubridad) to include sewers and potable water lines, and all new
housing was to be delivered water individually.101 People would no longer rely on
collective fountains and wells that had served the city’s inhabitants for centuries.
The shower was looked upon by sanitary reformers as the most progressive and
modern mode of bathing and the “most commonly used in the civilized coun-
tries.”102 It was hygienic, therapeutic, and allowed the bather to adjust the water
temperature, thus eliminating interactions with bathhouse workers and servants.
In the 1920s the Departamento de Salubridad passed Sanitary Engineering and
Potable Water regulations that required that each apartment in a building or a
vecindad have an individual water meter, and that showers be installed in all pri-
vate housing, new and old.103 In the draft of the Regulations for Public Baths written
in 1924, the Departamento de Salubridad required that public pools be emptied,
washed, and refilled with new water twice a week, and swimmers were to shower
before entering the pool. Public baths were obliged to provide sponges, soaps, and
other implements to individual bathers and these items were to be disposable.
Bathhouses dedicated to hygienic rather than medicinal bathing were required to
substitute the placer or tub with showers in private rooms.104 In medicinal, mineral
springs bathhouses such as Aragón and Peñón, the Departamento de Salubridad
allowed bathing in tubs, but required them to be cleaned daily and forbid the use of
bathwater by more than one person.105
The business of bathing changed over the first few decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, as more wealthy and middle-class Mexicans took showers at home, abandon-
ing the bathhouses to a swelling urban underclass. Bathhouse owners argued that
Mexico’s bathhouses were already better than those of New York, Chicago, Paris,
and London, and that the additional expenses of installing showers were unnec-
essary and would make bathing too costly for the “the middle and humble class,
employees and workers who form the great majority of the users.”106 The Alberca
Pane, the once-thriving establishment where Carlos Pacheco, Porfirio Díaz, and a
host of other elite customers met to swim, soak, steam, and socialize, was appar-
ently unable to pay for the required remodeling, and asked for an exemption from
the new rule to install showers.107
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    115

Salubridad’s effort to reshape bathing ran into opposition from owners of

baths, real estate developers, and landlords. The department convened a meet-
ing between government officials, property owners and developers, and sanitary
engineer Roberto Gayol. The young Salubridad officials insisted that the landlords
and developers be required to install a shower for every dwelling, and one shower
for every twenty people living in collective dwellings such as vecindades and old
houses that had been divided into apartments. The property owners protested that
costs would be prohibitive, and that such measures were wasted on a public that
was not particularly clean. Salubridad countered that showers were needed to cre-
ate new habits of hygiene among the poor, but that bathing itself did not need pro-
motion: the bathhouses were thronged, more than ever before, by working-class
and poor city dwellers. Rather, the new habit they sought to promote was shower-
ing at home, and it was indeed adopted en masse during the twentieth century,
displacing public bathhouses almost entirely.

C O N C LU SIO N S

Roberto Gayol eased into his chair at the new headquarters of Public Health, built
on the Paseo de la Reforma at the edge of the Bosque de Chapultepec, and admired
the modern art-deco architecture. Gayol remembered when this part of the city was
still open fields, when he directed the construction of water and sewer lines that
serviced the new middle-class neighborhoods erected after 1900. All those houses
had running water and bathrooms, and now the young engineers of Public Health
were attempting to bring these amenities to the rest of the folks in Mexico City. He
admired their revolutionary zeal to build a new, more integrated nation, but had
his doubts. The Sanitary Engineering Code they presented at the meeting made
showers obligatory in all dwellings, but the landlords and developers at the table
fought the measure. Gayol agreed with the landlords that it would be too expensive
and difficult to retrofit the colonial period buildings in the city center, but he did
not second their opinion that poor Mexicans who lived in older sections of the
city in vecindades [tenement blocks] and apartments without plumbing “were just
plain dirty.” Showers should be available to those people too, and he agreed with the
licenciados of Public Health that the infrastructure would promote good habits of
hygiene. At 73, he had lived long enough to recognize that the revolutionary effort to
create a culture of bathing around household showers was the logical conclusion of
the modernizing hydraulic engineering project that he had begun fifty years earlier.

Source: AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 21, Exp. 9, Transcript of Meeting (April 9, 1930).

After 1850, bathing changed in important ways, a result of hydraulic opulence,

capital looking for profits, and new scientific knowledge of chemistry and
116    chapter 6

microbiology. The idea of water moved toward that of a uniform substance, deliv-
ered through encompassing infrastructures. But at the same time, everybody
recognized a diversity of tastes and qualities among the different water sources
that supplied Mexico City. By 1858 the hard water of the Chapultepec springs and
the soft water of the aqueduct from the Santa Fe springs were supplemented by
wells in Bucareli, Los Migueles, and the Calle de Cordobanes. These waters and
others were analyzed by chemists who described their temperature, density and
levels of oxygen, carbonic acid, calcium sulfate, bicarbonate of calcium, and other
contents.108 Waters had always been recognized for their various qualities (gorda,
delgada, gruesa, dulce, salada, hedionda, azufrosa, etc.), and these distinctions
could increasingly be explained by chemists in terms of content of minerals, gases,
organic matter, and the like. Mexican chemists, like their European counterparts,
understood that different waters had different uses: “some were destined to satisfy
household needs, others for industrial ones, and not a few for restoring the health
of man.”109 Some waters, such as those from the artesian wells near San Lázaro,
were unpalatable and smelled badly because of dissolved gases, and were not con-
sidered useful. In an interesting paradox, waters continued to be viewed as plural
and specific because scientists and planners sought to combine them and convert
them into a singular substance.
The sciences of chemistry, microbiology, and medicine grappled with the speci-
ficity of all these waters. The discovery by Pasteur and his contemporaries of the
microscopic animals responsible for fermentation as well as sickness placed medi-
cine on a new footing, as health was resignified as cleanliness, and cleaning made
into a battle against germs. The hegemony of microbiology and hygiene rebal-
anced the range of acceptable purposes for bathing, but it was a fragile hegemony.
Water used for cleanliness was also a threat to hygiene, as it could just as easily
bring bodies into contact with those elements that were considered dangerous.
Bathtubs and soaking gave way to showers and rinsing, ensuring that once washed
from the skin, “dirtiness” was banished rapidly down the drain. Newly perceived
dangers of baths came to compete with long-held ideas about the therapeutic ben-
efits of water, and the cleansing flow of the shower stood out as the most hygienic
interaction with the liquid.
Despite the rise of the hygienic understanding of water, the therapeutic, ludic,
and recreational dimensions of bathing were not displaced by the urge to clean,
but rather flourished as a parallel set of activities. The long shift to the shower and
the rise of the singular concept of sanitized water did not eradicate the engage-
ment with diverse waters. The increased flow of capital toward the business of
bathing was accompanied by an evolving discourse and practice of water therapy
that swirled at the fluid edge of medical orthodoxy. Bathhouses in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries such as the Alberca Pane offered an ever-wider
array of bathing experiences: hot, lukewarm, and cold waters, plunge baths, steam,
dry saunas, placeres, swimming pools, inhalation chambers, drinking fountains,
 Chemistry, Biology, and the Heterogeneity of Modern Waters    117

and showers of all different kinds. After 1920 the solitary household shower with
public water grew to be the most important daily contact most city dwellers had
with the liquid, but heterogeneous waters and water cultures lived on in the hot
springs resorts and bottling plants that flourished throughout Mexico during the
­twentieth century.
 7

Dispossession and Bottling after

the Revolution

Mineral springs attracted renewed attention during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Artesian wells and expanding urban infrastructure produced
an opulence of public water that enabled bathhouses to proliferate, reshaping
bathing practices and socialities. At the same time, however, the homogenization
of water actually boosted the value of heterogeneous waters, and investors turned
to mineral springs with newfound interest. During the Porfiriato, spas and bath-
houses were built and rebuilt in Guadalupe and Peñón, and new railroads brought
tourists to baths in Aguascalientes, Topo Chico, and Tehuacán. In addition to the
expanded bathhouses, entrepreneurs took advantage of widespread and long-
standing ideas about the curative efficacy of mineral waters and opened bottling
plants at those sites.
Historian Luis Aboites (1998) describes a long process between 1880 and 1946,
facilitated in some ways by the Mexican Revolution, of expanding national-state
control over water resources. The narrative of state centralization certainly captures
much of Mexican water history, but I wish to narrow the focus on the mechanisms
by which centralization proceeded. The history of the Tehuacán and Topo Chico
mineral springs reveals the ultimate beneficiary of state centralization to be the
private bottling industry, a process that might be more accurately called primitive
accumulation. Karl Marx depicted this process as a violent rupture of customary
property relations “written in the annals of history in letters of blood and fire.”1 In
twentieth-century Mexico, however, the dispossession of water resources was more
often realized through legal and political mechanisms supported by technoscience,
and the emergent fields of hydrology and hydraulic engineering were particularly
important.2 This was a quotidian, cultural process involving the authority of certain

118
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    119

kinds of argument, reasoning, and evidence, and an engagement with the bureau-
cratic procedures of the state. Also, while these waters were bottled for exchange
in the marketplace, it was the assumption of heterogeneity and ­singularity—their
culturally formed use-values—that drove their commoditization.3

T H E BU SI N E S S O F B O T T L I N G M I N E R A L WAT E R S

Since the Middle Ages in Europe, pilgrims who could not make the long trip to
springs such as Lourdes were still able to secure the effects by quaffing bottled
water. Bottled mineral waters became increasingly common in the early n ­ ineteenth
­century in Europe and North America. Part of this was due to the expansion of
transportation infrastructure that made it much cheaper to bring the curative
waters to their hopeful consumers in the cities. Bottling was a business venture
that was both profitable and promoted public health, yet did not require patients
to visit the bathhouse. “The exportation of these waters great distances within the
country is very easy,” José Lobato pointed out in 1884, “and should be as beneficial
to the sick people who are treated with this medicinal water by ingestion, as it is to
the bottler who knows how to set up shops in the capital of every state.”4 Another
reason for this growth in bottling was that the local water sources in the grow-
ing cities were increasingly contaminated, and mineral waters bottled at faraway
springs were less prone to contamination. Notions of the therapeutic character of
diverse waters, as well as the unhealthfulness of the homogeneous water that was
served through public pipes, bolstered the value of heterogeneous waters.
Ideas about why waters were curative, and how to administer them, increas-
ingly favored bottling. By the 1880s doctors had concluded that the skin was an
effective barrier to the absorption of minerals from water, and that the minerals
in the waters needed to be delivered through inhalation and ingestion rather than
bathing. In his study of mineral waters in Mexico, José Lobato describes inhalation
techniques, pioneered in Germany, that required water to be “pulverized” into a
mist(see earlier figure 10), or, if it was thermal water, that the steam be captured
in a sauna-like “oven.” Just as the new inhalation techniques required a specially
designed apparatus, so too did the bottling of mineral waters. To maintain their
mineral content, waters could not be exposed to the air, to light or any other impu-
rity, nor agitated, heated, or subjected to changes in air pressure. A siphon was
used to fill champagne bottles, stoppered with corks soaked in the mineral waters,
and then coated with plaster. The bottling of mineral waters for drinking was thus
a highly medicalized procedure that should, Lobato argued, be overseen and certi-
fied by a doctor.
At the same time that they were medicine, these early bottled mineral waters
were also becoming food: they were the forerunners of the soft drinks we know
today. Around 1800 a number of companies in Europe began to produce water with
added CO2, and these gained favor for their taste and their medicinal qualities, and
120    chapter 7

Figure 13. “Salón de embotellado de las Aguas.” El Mundo Ilustrado 2, no. 12 (1906). With
permission of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Hemeroteca Nacional de México,
Fondo Reservado.

were recommended for everyday use as table water. Other minerals, medicines,
and drugs, such as strychnine, arsenic, quinine, and coca, were added to them by
doctors, and it was also common to add sweet flavored syrup or to mix the concoc-
tion with white wine. Drinks were bottled with ever-larger amounts of sugar, part
of a wider trend in the history of industrial society toward sweetened fast foods.
Coca-Cola and other soft drinks based in “soda” waters (those mineral waters with
carbonic acid and dissolved carbon dioxide) got their start at this intersection of
medicine, fast food, and mass consumption.5
In Mexico, the industrial bottling of mineral waters for mass consumption
began in the late nineteenth century, at the same time that the country’s beer indus-
try was founded. The sumptuous new spa at Peñón de los Baños featured a bottling
plant, with the most modern and efficient machinery, using glass bottles that were
produced in Monterrey’s glass factories. José Lobato was a foremost proponent of
bottled mineral waters for medicinal purposes, and he urged doctors and bottlers
not to add red wine or other substances that would change the mineral makeup of
the waters. Peñón produced plain mineral water at its plant at the bathhouse, and
the Compañía Explotadora de los Manantiales del Peñón stored the bottles at its
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    121

warehouse in downtown Mexico City, on Donceles Street, before shipping them

out to consumers. The “Aguas Minerales del Peñón” traveled widely, earning cus-
tomers across Mexico and, in competition with other mineral waters, a gold medal
in the Saint Louis Exposition of 1904. It did not hurt that the medicinal qualities
of Peñón’s waters came recommended by Eduardo Liceaga.6 Mineral springs, a key
element of modern bathing, also figured prominently in the emergence of mass
consumption of industrial products.

T E H UAC Á N : S TAT E P OW E R A N D T H E
C O N S O L I DAT IO N O F T H E B O T T L I N G I N D U S T RY

Tehuacán, Puebla, was not far behind Peñón in the popularity of its bottled
waters during the Porfiriato, and after the revolution it quickly eclipsed Peñón.
For ­centuries the town lured patients seeking a cure from kidney stones and other
maladies, and since the 1890s the plush hotel and balneario “El Riego” received
visitors by train from Mexico City and Puebla who sought an exclusive and thera-
peutic mineral waters treatment with baths and drinking fountains. Like Peñón
de los Baños, the town’s springs were promoted by the scientific community and
the Secretaría de Fomento during the Porfiriato, and a tram connected El Riego
to the local train station. By the early 1920s a half-dozen hotels and three bath-
houses served visitors of all social strata, and Tehuacán became the foremost
watering place for Mexican state officials.7 This was due in large part to the influ-
ence of President Plutarco Elias Calles (1924–28), who made Tehuacán’s Hotel-
Spa El Riego a second home, occasionally even holding cabinet meetings there.
Thousands of visitors synchronized their leisure choices with those of Calles and
his senior officials.
The presence of the postrevolutionary government in Tehuacán soon turned
into scrutiny of the healthfulness of the town’s mineral waters, and in particular, its
bottling industry. In the late 1920s the Departamento de Salubridad Pública made
a concerted effort to regulate the production of mineral waters (aguas minerales),
sparkling waters (aguas gaseosas), and soft drinks (refrescos). Salubridad Pública
carried forward the Porfirian preoccupation with microbiology almost without
pause during the revolution, and this knowledge of bacteria, amoebas, and other
vectors of disease combined with much older ideas about the curative properties of
particular waters to produce the conclusion that waters could hurt as well as heal.
The business of bottling originally grew around mineral waters and their promise
to cure, but bottled drinking water soon became desired for its purported purity,
displacing in wealthy households the water delivered by urban water systems and
water carriers. By the 1920s, bottled water had expanded into a thriving cottage
industry producing many varieties of sweetened and carbonated waters that most
often did not employ mineral waters at all. The multiplication of industrial bottled
drinks resonated with deep-seated assumptions about the benefits and value of
122    chapter 7

heterogeneous waters, but attracted the attention of public health officials worried
about the potential harm these waters could cause.
Businessmen had been shipping Tehuacán’s mineral water to Puebla and
Mexico City since the late 1800s. It was initially used as a form of medicine, in
line with centuries of practice of bathing in and drinking mineral waters for their
curative properties, and was sold in boticas (pharmacies) alongside other curative
waters. With the construction of the train, the water was much easier to trans-
port, and large bottles (garrafones) of water were “shipped daily” for use “in all
parts of Mexico, in houses, hotels, cantinas.”8 During the revolution, the largest of
these bottling plants, the Cruz Roja and the San Lorenzo Mineral Water Company,
were ransacked and burned, and labor mobilization troubled the industry in the
1920s.9 In this context an array of smaller companies with improvised produc-
tion methods and lax sanitary control sprouted up alongside a half-dozen bigger,
more established ones. Tehuacán’s bottlers continued to ship garrafones of drink-
ing water to clients in Mexico City such as President Emilio Portes Gil, but doubts
about quality attracted the regulatory action of Salubridad Pública.
On July 30, 1927, Salubridad Pública sent notice to Tehuacán’s bottlers that they
were prohibited from selling water until they could comply with Article 246 of the
Sanitary Code requiring that bottled waters be free from biological contamination,
and the National Railroad was ordered not to accept any water for shipment.10
The Montt family, owners of the El Riego hotel, told the National Public Health
Department (Salubridad Pública) that they bottled water from their spring only
so it could be used to cure patients, but Salubridad responded that the number of
E. coli bacteria discovered in the water bottled by them and many other compa-
nies in Tehuacán was dangerous to those patients.11 Salubridad Pública officials
made visits to the factories and found many of them to be lacking basic require-
ments of hygiene, with inferior capping machines and no machinery for sterilizing
the water. Some bottlers ignored the ruling and continued to bottle waters and
refrescos, but most shuttered their doors.12 The municipal government of Tehuacán
responded to the crisis in confidence toward Tehuacán’s waters by arguing that
“everyone in the country knows that the only thing that gives life to this city are the
curative virtues of its waters,” and that for years the town had been building up its
credit and prestige among doctors and visitors.13 But tourists, convinced that the
waters were more harmful than curative, stayed away.
To address the problems with sanitation and hygiene, the bigger bottlers agreed
to comply with national health codes by building infrastructure to capture and
convey the mineral waters from the springs. After negotiating with Salubridad
Pública, the companies installed a system of covered concrete canals that began
at the springs and carried water to the area of town where the bottlers were. The
municipal government of Tehuacán also raised funds from the state and federal
governments to rebuild its own local water distribution system. By November all
of the major bottlers had installed capping machines, and these were inspected and
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    123

Figure 14. “Empacadora—Aguilar Cacho.” With permission of the Archivo Histórico de la

Secretaría de Salud, Mexico City, Mexico. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 9, Exp. 1. Note the new capping
machine.

certified by Salubridad Pública.14 In addition, the bottlers agreed that Salubridad

would train and certify the workers in hygienic practices, and that all products
would be labeled with the date of production.15 The bottlers coordinated efforts to
raise money for the works, and installed automated production systems to reduce
human contact with the water and the bottles. However, they asked in exchange
that the federal government prohibit and prosecute the production of unregulated
artisanal bottled water, the use of labels that falsely advertised bottles as Tehuacán
mineral water, as well as the importation of foreign mineral waters.16
Salubridad Pública’s intervention in the business of bottling extended through
the early 1930s, and resulted in a consolidation of the bottling industry, with fewer
artisanal producers and a narrower range of waters available to the public. Over
previous decades sparkling waters (gaseosas), lemonades, and other sweetened
drinks (refrescos) had proliferated, and there were, according to a spokesman for
the bottling industry, “an infinite number of clandestine factories that supply the
public with products of a terrible quality.”17 Often these were advertised as mineral
waters but were not, and many used saccharine produced in the United States
by Monsanto and imported illegally.18 The government stepped in to control the
variable quality of these waters, to the glee of large bottlers and the sugar industry.
Zealous agents of Salubridad Pública sent samples to their central laboratory, then
124    chapter 7

fined and closed offending factories in Mexico City, Tehuacán, Tampico, Cuautla,
Aguascalientes, Tepic, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Nuevo Laredo, and elsewhere for using
saccharine, saponin, and salicylic acid in their refrescos, and for labeling refrescos
as mineral waters.19 In Tehuacán, the larger bottlers that could afford to comply
with the regulations banded together to improve their infrastructure and resume
production, simultaneously benefitting from the state’s elimination of competi-
tors. In Topo Chico, investment by the Coca-Cola Company provided capital for
upgrading the bottling plant, allowing it to thrive in the new environment of sani-
tary regulation (see next section). In 1934 alone, hundreds of cases of adulteration
were prosecuted by the new “Sanitary Police” of Salubridad Pública, an effort that
resulted in “almost eradicating the once-frequent adulteration of drinks, especially
sparkling waters and pulque.”20
To support their effort to police the heterogeneity of waters in Mexico, Salubridad
Pública mounted a propaganda campaign in the pages of the Mexico City daily El
Universal, with articles by bottlers, lawyers, and doctors.21 Arturo Mundet, cre-
ator of the classic apple-flavored soft drink Sidral Mundet, argued that the sugar
which bottling companies put in soft drinks made them healthful, because sugar
is a preservative and provides calories. That the legitimate soft drink companies
used sugar was ensured by agents of Salubridad Pública monitoring their factories,
and El Universal alerted the public that because of the cost of sugar, any refresco
that sold for less than six cents a bottle was certain to contain saccharine or some
other artificial sweetener.22 Various articles in the El Universal presented cases of
children intoxicated by unsanitary sweets while playing in Chapultepec Park, such
as one-year-old Raúl Arriola, who died after drinking a bad artisanal soft drink.
Raúl’s sad story was evidence, El Universal argued, of the need for “strict vigilance
of the streets and public spaces” by Sanitary Police.23
Salubridad Pública’s policing of bottled waters happened at the same time that
it embarked on a wider effort to ensure water quality in municipal and rural water
systems across Mexico. Potable water and drainage systems were constructed with
Salubridad’s oversight and financing, and President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40)
planned to almost double the portion of the national budget dedicated to Salubridad
during his term, from 3 percent in 1933 to 5.5 percent in 1939. In 1935 Cárdenas autho-
rized the Secretaría de Hacienda y Credito Publico to provide 5.5 million pesos for
“supplying potable water to towns of less than twenty-five thousand inhabitants.”24
The hydraulic infrastructure promoted by Salubridad Pública delivered a singular,
sanitized public water, an effort analogous to its policing of bottled waters.

T O P O C H IC O : T H E S C I E N C E O F D I SP O S SE S SIO N

The history of the mineral springs in Topo Chico, Nuevo León, provides an exam-
ple of how state hydrologists and engineers facilitated the transfer of waters from
peasants to industrial capitalists. Congregación San Bernabe Topo Chico was a
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    125

Figure 15. Topo Chico bathhouse, c. 1890. With permission of DeGolyer Library, Southern
Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. AG1987; 0643.

small town situated in a large expanse of dry ranchlands in northeastern Mexico

that was awarded by the Spanish crown to Captain Lucas González Hidalgo in
1716. Residents passed the years tending livestock and farming a small cluster of
fields irrigated by the waters from two local springs, a hot spring known as “Agua
Caliente” and a warm spring called “Ojo Caliente.” A third spring, “La Saca,” issued
cold freshwater but only really flowed when it rained. The springwater was scant,
hot, and carried minerals, but it flowed steadily and did not hurt their fields. The
water was fine for cleaning dishes and houses, and people agreed that there were
therapeutic benefits from drinking and bathing in it. There was never enough
water, of course, for all those who wished to use it, but while quarrels over water
were common the town managed the resource in a communal fashion.
This all began to change with the building of the bathhouse in Topo Chico in
1882, and the arrival of a stream of visitors from the United States. The western
United States, taken from Mexico by force in 1848, was an especially attractive des-
tination for urbanites from the Eastern Seaboard who traveled seeking the health
benefits they perceived would be gained from fresh air, wide-open spaces, and a
more immediate interaction with the natural world.25 Mineral springs, long valued
for their therapeutic dimensions, were among the first places claimed, settled, and
developed by the newcomers. In Texas, for example, hundreds of mineral spring
resorts enjoyed a boom between 1860 and 1920, peaking in popularity around
1900.26 The expansion of mineral and hot springs resorts across the southwest
126    chapter 7

United States was facilitated by railroad companies, which often developed the hot
springs nearby their newly constructed lines.
The construction of railroads in Mexico in the 1880s enabled visitors to travel
from Texas all the way to Mexico City, and Mexican mineral springs were important
destinations for Americans seeking cures and seeing the sights.27 Aguascalientes—
named after the famous hot waters located there—attracted the interest of almost
everyone riding the train from the northern border down to Mexico City, and
traveler accounts from the time go into detail about the bathhouses and bathers of
that city (see chapter 5).28 In the border state of Chihuahua, the Atchison, Topeka,
and Santa Fe line built a connection to the hot springs of Santa Rosalia,29 and vari-
ous efforts were made between 1900 and 1932 to develop the springs just south of
the border in San Antonio, Chihuahua, in order to attract gringo tourists.30
The encroachment on hot springs in northern Mexico by new actors and ideas
was especially notable in the small settlement of Congregación San Bernabé Topo
Chico. For most of the town’s history the waters of the Ojo Caliente were left to run
their course, and it was not until around 1850 that townspeople constructed a six-
by-twelve-meter pool out of stone and cement to store water, and a springhouse to
protect the source. The pool supported the traditional domestic and agricultural
uses, but also enabled a new use—bathing—especially by those arriving from afar
with clear ideas about the therapeutic properties of the waters. Locals charged
these health seekers a few cents for access to the reservoir, but shared no common
opinion about the desirability of developing the hot springs for bathing tourism.31
Regardless, the interest of the outsiders in the medicinal properties of the waters
was keen, and their efforts to establish a business with the mineral waters were
supported by Bernardo Reyes, provisional governor of Nuevo León. At Reyes’s
coaxing, the townspeople met and hashed out a forty-year deal by which their
waters were concessioned to American Emma Slayden, who was required to build
a bathhouse and provide other amenities. Four years later, A.C. Schryver of Waco,
Texas, took over the contract, and hired community members to build that bath-
house using water from the Agua Caliente spring, thus creating the Compañía
de Baños Topo Chico. Bernardo Reyes also awarded Schryver a concession for a
mule-drawn railroad linking Topo Chico to Monterrey.
Schryver got the money to build the railroad from expatriate American financier
and Monterrey resident Jules A. Randle.32 Randle inherited the wealth of a slaveo-
wning family from Georgia that moved to Texas just after the Mexican-American
war to run a cotton plantation. He fought in the Confederate army, and upon sur-
render moved back to the family plantation on the Brazos River in Texas, which
became one of the largest cotton farms in the region. His arrival in Monterrey in 1881
made him one of northern Mexico’s largest capitalists, investing in urban railroads,
properties around Monterrey, and silver mines. He was president and owner of the
Monterrey and Santa Catalina Railroad and the Topo Chico Hot Springs Railroad,
and owned one-quarter of the enormous Rosario Silver Mining Company.33
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    127

With the capital of Randle and others the business of bathing in Topo Chico
was up and running. The new bathhouse had a men’s area and women’s area, each
with its own pool 13 meters long, 5 meters wide, and 1.8 meters deep. Each of
the two areas also had twelve tubs, fabricated of wood and zinc, each in its own
3-by-2.5-meter wooden stall with a wood and cloth cot. Admission to the bath,
including the 45-minute, three-mile tram ride from downtown Monterrey, was 50
cents. Nearby, another group of Americans built a luxurious hotel to cater to the
American tourists, with a kitchen run by an American chef. In 1893 E.R. Glass built
the Hotel Marmól across the street from the bathhouse to cater to the new influx of
visitors to the hot springs, by then known regionally, nationally, and internation-
ally for their curative properties.34 Jules Randle invested some of his silver fortune
in the $250,000 Hotel Marmól.35
A number of German and American doctors arrived to Topo Chico to offer
their services to health-seekers using the waters.36 One of these, Dr. G.F. Brooks,
moved from the paradigmatic mineral springs town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, to
try his luck at this emerging tourist health spa.37 So widely known were the springs
that J.H. Blackburn, a doctor from Texas searching for a cure for his gout and
diabetes, included Topo Chico in an itinerary that also listed far-flung mineral
water health resorts such as Lithia Springs, Virginia, and Hot Springs, Arkansas.38
The Mexican National Railroad Company, which connected the United States to
Monterrey and the local Topo Chico tramway, distributed a free booklet promot-
ing “Tropical Tours to Toltec Towns,” and highlighted Topo Chico’s “superb baths
and a good hotel, all under American management.”39 The town of Topo Chico
quickly became a mecca for American visitors, giving rise to a host of peripheral
services, such as a local dairy run by American settlers. One visitor noted that “the
whole settlement” of Topo Chico was “managed by Americans.”40
Bottling was an equally important business at Topo Chico that grew to eventu-
ally displace the bathhouse in the 1930s. The waters of Topo Chico achieved such
fame during the last decades of the nineteenth century that Randle contracted
the rights to six liters per second of the springflow from the community of Topo
Chico and began bottling the mineral water under the brand name of Topo Chico
for distribution to visitors and inhabitants of the region.41 In 1900 the community
of Topo Chico signed a contract giving permission to Emma Slayden to build a
bottling plant, although still in 1902 a traveler noted that “the springs themselves
stand in a shady grove” and were not captured by a bottling plant at their origin.42
Emilio Hellión, a Frenchman residing in Monterrey, bought into the Topo Chico
bottling company and, together with Manuel Cantú Treviño, secured capital from
the New York firm Wilson and Company to expand and consolidate the opera-
tion.43 At the same time, Pedro Treviño, one of San Bernabé Topo Chico’s wealthy
landowners and owner of the ephemeral La Saca spring, built a spring house and
factory for ice and soda, investing upward of 100,000 pesos. Much of this money
likely came from outside investors.
128    chapter 7

Conflicts emerged as bottling intensified. Treviño’s development of the La Saca

spring was opposed by members of the community, and as a result of their com-
plaints an expert in hydrology was sent by the city government of Monterrey to
investigate. Because he had dug a well and the springwater did not flow beyond his
property, Treviño was found to be the legal owner of the spring. This first conflict
over the springs set the tone for the competing social uses and politics of these
springs during the next forty years, which would continue to be characterized
by divisions within the community and a major role for government scientists in
determining the nature of the water resources, and in transferring control and use
to capital.44
As bathing and bottling grew in popularity at the end of the nineteenth century
information was needed to govern competition over mineral springs. The emer-
gent science of hydrology assumed the task of determining if water was property
of the nation, the state of Nuevo León, or private landowners. During the rule
of Porfirio Díaz (1880–1911) the government made an effort to map the Mexican
countryside, and distributed lands to surveying companies to promote this activ-
ity.45 Despite these actions, small water sources such as hot springs remained under
the radar of the state. For example, in 1904 local residents asked the secretary of
agriculture and development for rights to build a bathhouse at the hot springs in
Las Cabras, Chihuahua, but the federal government could not even find those hot
springs on their map.46 In the case of the hot springs near Catemaco, Veracruz, the
Secretaría de Obras Públicas did not possess a map of the region, let alone of the
springs, and could not acquire one from any other branch of government.47 Even
when the government’s own maps registered hot springs, and those springs were
located on federal lands, officials usually had no information about spring flow,
temperature, established uses, or anything else.
The waters of Topo Chico attracted the attention of regional and interna-
tional capital, and their status as a community resource was challenged. In 1898
the national government declared the waters of the drainage where the Topo
Chico springs were located—the Arroyo Topo Chico—to be national waters,
because they led to the Santa Catarina River, which eventually emptied into the
Río Bravo.48 This was confirmed, at least on paper, by a map from 1904, although
the community of Topo Chico continued to dispose of “its” hot springs in the
ways established during the previous centuries: for domestic use and gardens, for
animals, and for bathing. The recent turn to concessioning the waters to bottling
and bath companies did not put into question community ownership over the
resource.49 During the revolution, popular ideas about “land and liberty” rein-
forced local control of the hot springs and in 1917, a new Constitution was written
which enshrined the radical liberal idea that the land should belong to those who
worked it. In 1918, with local agrarian rebels in charge of the bathhouse, the waters
of the drainage in which the Topo Chico hot springs were located were ruled to
be private rather than national waters. This ruling validated the existing contract
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    129

between the Community of San Bernabé Topo Chico and the bottling and bath
companies, and short-circuited the possibility that the waters would be national-
ized by the federal government.50
Nature in northern Mexico did not submit readily to the scientists, for the arid
landscape did not conform to hydrological concepts such as “river.” Water often
only flowed during the rainy season, and small drainages (arroyos) such as that
of Topo Chico would only carry water during storms. The same maps that failed
to register hot springs depicted flowing rivers that were in reality simply drain-
ages that hardly ever carried surface water. Furthermore, water laws written before
the rise of hydrological science did not contemplate the connections between the
surface waters and subsoil waters,51 and Mexico’s constitution only incorporated
groundwater in 1945, with a reform to Article 27.52 To complicate this issue, the
waters of hot springs, which emerge from deep below the surface of the earth,
usually have little to do with those that run in drainages either as subsoil water or
surface water.
Water was considered a common-pool resource in Mexico before and after the
revolution, as the postrevolutionary state incorporated popular concepts of com-
mon property of land and water into the new Constitution of 1917. But who had the
authority to designate the legitimate users of that common property? The answer
involves issues of scale and scientific authority. Mexican water administration
was organized legally by a principle of geographical scale. Water that did not flow
beyond the boundaries of a single property was considered part of that property.
Water that flowed across different properties but not across a state’s borders was
under the jurisdiction of that state’s government. That which crossed state lines,
such as the water carried by the Salado and San Juan rivers and their tributaries,
was national; if a river drained into the Río Bravo (known as the Río Grande in the
United States) it was water governed by international treaties as well. All national
water was the common property of the nation, to be administered by the federal
government, and during the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period, water,
like land, was the object of nationalization and redistribution by the federal gov-
ernment. These were scales of government, and obviously political.
Science supported the slow process of primitive accumulation and the transi-
tion from peasant uses of water to capitalist uses. In Topo Chico, a local spring that
in 1880 supported diverse economic activities of peasant households was, by 1950,
completely utilized by one the biggest industrial bottling companies in Mexico
and the world. Rather than hinder it, the long process of revolution (1910–20) and
postrevolutionary state formation ushered along the process of accumulation by
dispossession. The armies and leaders of this conflict formed constantly shifting
alliances, and communities were divided along these lines. In Topo Chico the rev-
olution fractured existing agreements about the legitimate uses and owners of the
spring waters, and a group of rebels rose in opposition to those in the community
who dominated the land and water and controlled the town government. As the
130    chapter 7

Figure 16. “Manantial Agua Caliente,” c. 1930. With permission of the Archivo Histórico del
Agua, Mexico City, Mexico. AHA, AN, Caja 463, Exp. 4893.

revolutionary movement across northern Mexico died down, and the victorious
generals began the process of rebuilding the Mexican state, the local rebels of Topo
Chico adopted the politics of agrarian reform (agrarismo), pressing the federal
government to nationalize land and water held by the wealthier members of the
community and award it to them as a collective farm, or ejido.
The social upheaval wrought important changes to the bathing and bottling
businesses that used Topo Chico springwater. Pedro Treviño’s ice and soda factory,
which utilized the La Saca spring, was abandoned, and the foreign investors in the
Topo Chico bottling company fled, selling their stakes to regional businessmen
Manuel Barragán and Leónides Páez. The Compañía de Baños met the same fate
when the national and international tourism that had supported the bathhouse
and hotel ceased completely because of the violence. In 1921, in one of its first
actions, the newly constituted Department of Public Health (Salubridad Pública)
closed the baths, citing the unhygienic state of the facilities.
In 1922, the contract between the town of San Bernabe Topo Chico (still
the holder of legal rights to the hot springs water) and the Compañía de Baños
expired.53 Without a contract for the waters, without a bathhouse in condition to
receive customers, and without customers brave enough to visit Topo Chico, the
Compañía de Baños went out of business and the installations were taken over by
agraristas. They, however, had no means with which to improve or maintain the
infrastructure of the baths, and soon “the roofs were falling and the tubs, walls and
pipes were so deteriorated and filthy that very few people dared use them.”54 In
the turmoil, the town government asserted itself, taking over the administration
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    131

of the hot springs water “by the unanimous will of the neighbors and community
members who live in Topo Chico.”55 In an effort to force the bottling company to
agree to a new contract, the town government cut off water to the bottling plant
and took out advertisements in the newspapers of Monterrey accusing the com-
pany of bottling regular water, not mineral water.56 Soon after, the town govern-
ment delivered a petition to the federal government in which it claimed to be the
rightful owner of the mineral springwater and asked that it be returned. In 1924
the town reopened the baths under its own control after correcting the problems
cited by Salubridad Pública.57
The struggle over land and water in Topo Chico proceeded in fits and starts,
and different levels of government intervened on behalf of different actors. To
deal with the agrarista uprising, in December of 1923 the governor of the state of
Nuevo León orchestrated a land transfer outside of the federal agrarian reform
process aimed at establishing peace between the competing factions in the town.
A transfer shifted 1,444 hectares of land acquired by large landowners in the mid-
nineteenth century to the agraristas, but before this agreement was signed into
state law in March 1925, the community submitted a parallel request to the fed-
eral government’s Agrarian Reform Commission (CNA) for the return of those
same lands, claiming that the Congregación San Bernabé once owned them. The
local branch of the federal government approved the request, but it was rejected at
the state level by the governor of Nuevo León, who had already brokered a simi-
lar reform. Pressured by the federal government, the state government eventu-
ally approved the federal creation of an ejido as a new concession of land rather
than a return of land. In August of 1926 President Plutarco Elias Calles declared
a resolution awarding the ejido, and thereby annulling the state of Nuevo León’s
1923 agreement.58 This award of land rejected the community’s ancestral claim to
the resource, and reinforced the federal government’s position that it was the only
legitimate owner and administrator of national land and water.
Once the land was delivered, the struggle turned to water, and was fought on
the terrain of hydrology. The central problem was that there was not enough water
to irrigate the newly distributed lands. The Presidential Resolution of 1926 par-
celed out 25 hectares of gardens and orchards near the town, and 2 liters per sec-
ond of water from the hot springs for domestic uses and for livestock, but did not
provide the 7.9 liters per second of water needed to irrigate those 25 hectares. A
bigger problem, however was that the resolution also failed to provide the 73.2
liters per second of water needed to irrigate the 1,444 hectares of previously unirri-
gated lands that was also part of the distribution.59 With the hope of resolving this
problem, the community of Topo Chico petitioned the secretary of agriculture to
declare the waters of the Arroyo Topo Chico national, and not private, so that they
might lodge a claim to them through the federal government’s agrarian reform
process.60 The secretary of agriculture sent an engineer to make a study (the sec-
ond) of the springs and the Arroyo Topo Chico into which they drained, and in
132    chapter 7

June of 1927 the waters of the arroyo, including the springwaters, were indeed
declared national property because, the engineer argued, the waters formed part
of a drainage that eventually led to the Río Bravo.61 Once placed under control of
the federal government, the issue turned to whom the federal government would
award their use.
When the hot springs waters were nationalized (for the second time), the local
town government of San Bernabe Topo Chico immediately took over the bath-
house. Its leader, Celso Cepeda, asked permission from the federal government to
“make use of the hot water for the public baths that [the town] will refurbish using
money from the agrarian bank.”62 The town government then squared off against
the Compañía de Baños Topo Chico, accusing it of never paying the monthly
charge for the waters of 100 pesos that was stipulated in the contract. The Compañía
countered with the opposite claim: that it had been paying the 100 pesos to Cepeda
for some time.63 Then, in March of 1928, the ejidatarios of Topo Chico occupied
the bathhouse.64 The state government of Nuevo León immediately intervened,
ordering the Congregación to return the facilities to J.T. Garza, proprietor of the
Compañía de Baños.65 The state government declared that the ejidatarios did not
have permission to use the waters for industrial purposes, and the Compañía de
Baños could therefore continue to use them for bathing and bottling.66 This deci-
sion was based on the assertion that the hot springs were local waters rather than
federal waters.67 The federal government protested to the state that “the declaration
of Arroyo Topo Chico as national waters would not be reconsidered.”68
The state government continued to assert its right to manage both the Topo
Chico springs and the conflicts surrounding them, brokering a deal between the
town of Topo Chico and the Compañía de Baños de Topo Chico and its operator,
J.T. Garza. In a twenty-year contract signed in May of 1928, the town was declared
owner of the bathhouse, with its baths and offices, as well as a nearby park and
bandshell and various other properties. These facilities were to be rented by the
Compañía de Baños Topo Chico for 100 pesos a month. The waters of the hot
springs were to be used only for the bathhouse, and then sent to a tank where
the town could distribute them for irrigation. Garza was obliged to invest 20,000
pesos in repairs over the next five years.69 The town made a separate, forty-year
(1928–68) contract with Manuel Barragán for the use of the waters by the bottling
company—the Compañía de Aguas Gaseosas.70 The ejidatarios of the Topo Chico
were told to relinquish their hold on the bathhouse and spring waters, and that
there was no water in the Río Santa Catarina to irrigate their new fields.71 The most
they got was permission from the secretary of agriculture and development to
build, at their own cost, a horizontal filtration well (galeria filtrante) to collect the
water.72 They made an effort to secure an industrial concession for the hot springs
water, presenting a map from 1904 that showed the hot springs were part of the Río
Santa Catarina, and thus national waters they could solicit.73 Bathhouse operator
J.T. Garza defended his access to the water with a municipal map of Monterrey that
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    133

showed the Arroyo Topo Chico petering out in the irrigated fields of San Nicolás,
without reaching the Río Santa Catarina. It was not federal water, he concluded,
and therefore ownership by the town, and the lease to the bathhouse and bottling
companies, should stand.74
For most of the 1920s both Nuevo León and the federal government of Mexico
claimed jurisdiction over the springs, using scientific arguments about the origin
and destination of the waters. The contracts brokered by the state government of
Nuevo León were based on rights and concessions that had yet to be established
by the federal government, which by then considered itself the proprietor of the
water. In order to award these concessions, and regularize the contracted uses of
the water, in August 1929, the Federal Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento sent
engineer Ramón Áviles to conduct a third study of the springs. He spoke with
different parties that used the hot springs, took measurements of streamflow and
photographs of the installations, drew up maps of the site, and wrote a detailed
report. He concluded that both the Ojo Caliente and the Los Baños (Agua Caliente)
hot springs were permanent, and the La Saca flowed only when it rained. The Los
Baños (Agua Caliente) hot spring was used by the bathhouse, the bottling com-
pany, and the townspeople for domestic chores, while Ojo Caliente and La Saca
were used to irrigate gardens and orchards. All the water from the three sources
was used completely.75 Áviles’s report concluded that the Topo Chico springs were
national waters, and the 1926 presidential declaration of water rights should stand.
The town had rights by presidential decree to 2 liters per second (lps) of the Los
Baños (Agua Caliente) hot spring for domestic uses. In addition, the engineer
assigned 7.92 lps of the water divided among La Saca, Ojo Caliente, and Los Baños
to irrigate the twenty-five hectares of orchards and fields for which there was previ-
ously no water assigned.
With the submission of Áviles’s report, any water use that was not formally
recognized by the federal government’s secretary of agriculture became illegal,
including customary uses that had been practiced by townspeople for generations.
Furthermore, with nationalization of the water confirmed by the report, whatever
water not assigned by the federal government was up for grabs through a process
of concession. Mexican water law held that rights to nationalized water should be
awarded to those who had established continuous, peaceful use of that water dur-
ing the previous five years. According to this formulation, both the town of San
Bernabe Topo Chico and the companies could lay claim to the liquid: the water
passed through the bottling plant and baths, and then the community used it.
Except for the water that ended up inside the bottles, the bathhouse and bottling
plant made “nonconsumptive” use of the liquid and handed it over to the commu-
nity for domestic uses and agriculture.
The nationalization of the Topo Chico springs directly benefitted the com-
panies, and facilitated the long-term shift in control from peasants to industrial
capitalists. Shortly after the 1929 report was submitted, the Ministry of Agriculture
134    chapter 7

and Development alerted the bottling and bath companies that they would need
to solicit a water concession or confirmation of existing use or their access to the
springwater would be suspended.76 In the same month that the engineer made his
survey, the Compañía Topo Chico filed a request that the government recognize
its rights to the springwater, claiming that it had used the medicinal waters in the
bathhouse since 1886.77 For its part, the town of San Bernabe Topo Chico filed
a request for a new concession of waters, arguing that it wished to expand the
bathhouse to expand curative services to a “public in pain.”78 At that moment,
however, the Ministry of Agriculture and Development overrode the deal bro-
kered by the state of Nuevo León that gave the town the property rights to the
bathhouse. The federal government ruled that the owner of the bathhouse was
Garza, not the town, and that furthermore he had “acquired the rights to the use
of those waters.”79 Also, a concession of 1.396 lps of water from all three springs
was awarded to the bottling company, and it was advised that it should no longer
pay the 100 pesos a month to the town for the use of the water, for the town was
no longer the owner.80 The town, seeing the water of the hot springs slip from its
hands, demanded its return, accusing the governor of Nuevo León of arbitrarily
given water away to “outsiders.”81
The consolidation of capital’s control over the Topo Chico springs in the form
of bathing and bottling moved steadily forward despite, and even because of, the
revolutionary turmoil and political uncertainties of the teens and early twenties.
The reconstruction and strengthening of the nation-state in Mexico carried with
it the nationalization of property rights for land and water and, in cases such as
Topo Chico, the state facilitated the transfer of common resources to private firms.
The Topo Chico bottling company actually expanded its offerings during the revo-
lutionary years to include flavored sodas such as ginger ale (“Yinyereil”) and an
apple drink called “Eva.” It also improved its factory by investing in a metal bottle
capping machine.82 And, in 1926, the company became the first bottler in Mexico
to produce Coca-Cola.83
By 1930, after years of neglect, the Compañía de Baños had rehabilitated the
bathhouse by laying down tiles and providing mattresses and rugs, and had spruced
up the town park, which had been used by the agrarista rebels to graze their horses.
Once fixed, a stream of visitors—including foreigners—returned to the baths,
lured by their medicinal qualities.84 Salubridad Pública monitored the installations,
to assure cleanliness and attractiveness for the tourists to the springs, and told the
community to scrub the tank where the residual waters from the bottling and bath-
house collected before being sent to the fields.85 Bitter residents replied that the
only reason it was dirty was because the bottling plant dumped syrups, soap, label
glue, and machine oil into it, and demanded that their water be delivered to them
first and to the bottling plant later.86 Having already won the day, the engineers
of the Ministry of Agriculture responded with righteous indignation, labeling the
complaints “morally wrong” and calling the townspeople “liars.”87 The ejidatarios,
 Dispossession and Bottling after the Revolution    135

for their part, concentrated their energy on fighting with agricultural producers
from neighboring communities for the water of the Río Santa Caterina.88
During the next decade, access to the Topo Chico hot springs would narrow even
further, as the bathhouse closed due to fading public interest and the bottling indus-
try consolidated its hold over the water. In 1930 the bottling plant of the Compañía
Topo Chico entered another period of expansion, and began to export products
by road and rail to cities in the states of Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila.
The company substituted the older brand of ginger ale with a new product called
“Ginger Ale Topo Club.”89 The Coca-Cola Company strengthened its relationship
with the Compañía Embotelladora Topo Chico, and its products, introduced in
1926, led the growth. Attracted by the success of the Topo Chico Company, a com-
peting bottling firm pressured the federal government to reassess spring flows once
again (the fourth time), and then grabbed the newly identified unassigned water
before it arrived to the townspeople, who were now the last in line. Local control
of the water for agriculture, drinking, and bathing was no more. Like most cities in
Mexico, Monterrey grew rapidly after 1940, incorporating neighboring communi-
ties and their lands, and the community of San Bernabé Topo Chico was integrated
into the urban sprawl in the 1960s.

C O N C LU SIO N S

Governments in Mexico facilitated the business of bottling in Mexico’s mineral

springs after the revolution (1910–20). In Tehuacán, the federal government’s
Departamento de Salubridad Pública imposed rules of sanitation and hygiene that
helped consolidate the control of large businesses over the production of mineral
waters, refrescos, aguas gaseosas, and other diverse bottled drinks. This resulted in
the control of the bottling business in that town by the Garci-Crespo company. In
Topo Chico, the government deployed the science of hydrology to gradually wrest
the spring waters from peasants and ranchers and redirect them to a bathhouse
and bottling plants. The Coca-Cola Company eventually took over bottling at the
Topo Chico springs, propelling the eventual displacement of all other social actors
and uses.
In both Tehuacán and Topo Chico the end result of this dispossession can be
seen in the meanings that these two place names carry today: both these words
are brand names synonymous for bottled gasified waters. By the 1950s, state inter-
vention in these two mineral springs helped transfer the waters from the hands
of local peasants to large industrial companies. Tehuacán’s Garci-Crespo company,
founded in 1928, grew to be the most important producer of mineral waters in cen-
tral Mexico, becoming the Peñafiel company in 1948, and eventually forming part of
Cadbury Schweppes (1992), and then part of the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group (1995).
The spring still bubbles forth deep beneath the bottling plant in a carefully con-
trolled catacomb that can be visited by tourists (but not photographed). In northern
136    chapter 7

Mexico a sparkling water is a Topo Chico, a name that is increasingly used in Texas
and the rest of the southwestern United States as well. Topo Chico is now the found-
ing brand of the Arca Continental Company, a conglomerate that produces snack
foods and is the second largest bottler of Coca-Cola in Latin America.90
Hydrology and biology accentuated the homogenization of waters, but para-
doxically, they also made their heterogeneous qualities more attractive. In
Tehuacán, the dangers of biological contamination were identified and combatted,
reducing the variable quality of bottled waters, contributing to their standardiza-
tion and turning them into a kind of public water. At the same time, the mineral
waters of Tehuacán and Topo Chico in their commodity form of bottled drinks
enjoyed widespread appeal precisely because of their specificity: their mineral
content, their particular geological origins (real or imagined), and the idea that
these springwaters have unique, culturally rich histories.91 The commoditization
of these waters did not smooth over their specificity; in fact, it depended on it.
 8

Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century

Mexico

Mineral springs had been a centerpiece of the experience of foreign visitors to

Mexico since the colonial period, when Spanish clerics soaked in the waters of
Peñón de los Baños and built baths at Cuincho and San Bartolomé, and natural sci-
entists sought to distill their curative secrets in the field and the laboratory. With the
demise of the Spanish empire, travelers made their way more freely to Mexico, often
stopping at different mineral and hot springs to test the waters. The war with the
United States in the 1840s brought a few soldiers from the United States to explore
the country. After 1860, foreigners rode the rails into Mexico as tourists, search-
ing for novel experiences of food, music, people, crafts, the splendor and bustle of
Mexico City, and archaeological sites such as Teotihuacán.1 The number of travelers’
accounts exploded after 1880, testimony to the new transportation infrastructure,
as well as the formation of a leisure class in the United States and Europe. This
expansion of tourism included wealthy Mexicans, a tide that also lifted workers and
even rural dwellers as the twentieth century progressed.2
Waters were a principal tourist attraction, and the economy of leisure was built
around them.3 Bourgeois residents of European and North American cities had
been spending their vacations at mineral water spas and seaside resorts for most of
the nineteenth century, and with the opening of Mexico to travel these same groups
began to visit springs in Aguascalientes, Tehuacán, Topo Chico, Lake Chapala, and
other sites. In chapter 5 we saw that as early as the 1840s urban Mexicans took to
country baths on hot spring days, and the bathhouses of Mexico’s towns and cities
were famous in the second half of the century for their number and quality. Elite
Mexican bathers joined foreigners at watering places that were oriented toward a
wealthy, cosmopolitan clientele, and rustic mineral springs bathing establishments

137
138    chapter 8

served those with less money who were also caught up in the spa boom. As was the
case with bottling businesses, spa tourism also generated conflicts over property
and access to mineral waters.
In this chapter I discuss the business of mineral springs bathing between 1920
and 1960. While springs such as Topo Chico and Tehuacán were captured by
industrial capital for bottling, many others were developed as tourist bathing des-
tinations. As we have seen, the business model of developing mineral springs for
health and therapy was pioneered in the Valley of Mexico by investors close to
President Porfirio Díaz, including his doctor, Eduardo Liceaga, and his father in
law, Manuel Romero Rubio, who built bathhouses and bottling plants that took
advantage of the special properties of the waters of Guadalupe and Peñón de los
Baños. With the consolidation of the postrevolutionary state in the 1920s in the
hands of northern Mexican generals, the effort to develop Mexico’s heterogeneous
waters was carried out with even more urgency. Not only did these politicians pro-
mote this development with new water laws and government resources, they also
invested their own money. The dispossession of mineral springs brought about by
government officials benefitted the businesses of those very same people.
Another notable aspect of this period in the history of Mexico’s waters is a shift in
the rationale of mineral springs bathing away from health and therapy and toward
leisure and tourism. By the 1920s the fascination with mineral water cures was wan-
ing among doctors, and the postrevolutionary state was more interested in promot-
ing public health through hygiene and sanitary water infrastructure. The microbial
revolution of the nineteenth century propelled biological understandings of disease
and wellness to the fore, a position that was consolidated after World War II with
the development of antibiotics. While most people retained the idea that mineral
spring waters were curative, they came to view waters first and foremost as vaca-
tion destinations that contributed to overall well-being through rest, relaxation,
and exercise. The therapeutic efficacy of the waters became less important.
Mexico’s water history is full of conflict generated by primitive accumulation,
policing, and scientific debate. However, the literature on hot springs, almost
all of it focused on Europe, scarcely mentions questions of access and property,
or struggles among peasants, scientists, clergy, and capital for control of waters.
Eric Jennings (2006), however, suggests that these struggles were a central issue
for mineral springs. In Mesoamerica, lands and waters were occupied by peas-
ants long before the arrival of Europeans, and although these peasant commu-
nities coexisted with and contributed to states for more than a thousand years,
they retained some measure of autonomy over local resources. Like that of Topo
Chico, the history of the town of Ixtapan de la Sal, in the state of Mexico, pro-
vides ample evidence that encroachment by capital and the state on these peasant
waters was met with resistance. Unlike Topo Chico, however, in Ixtapan de la Sal
that encroachment was eventually limited by this resistance. There, the municipal
government of the community fought the alienation of its waters, producing in the
 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico    139

end a compromise in which capital developed some springs for an elite market,
and the municipal government controlled other springs, ensuring that locals and
other less wealthy visitors had access to them, and that the town itself benefitted
from the business of bathing.

T H E S ON OR E N S E S A N D M I N E R A L SP R I N G S T O U R I SM

Agua Caliente hot spring bubbles up on the southern bank of the Tijuana River
just a hop, skip, and jump from the United States, across a seasonal trickle of water.
The spring is located on what was once the sprawling Rancho de la Tia Juana, a
property acquired by Santiago Argüello in the 1840s just before the present-day
border was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The waters of Agua
Caliente were used by locals as medicine, including to ease childbirth. One tes-
timony in 1920 claimed that all “the recent generations and descendants of Don
Ignacio Argüello saw the light for the first time in those waters.”4 Inspired by the
success of hot spring resorts across the American west in the last decades of
the nineteenth century, many speculators had designs on the springs, and in 1899
the Argüello family leased the springs to David Hoffman, who founded the “Agua
Caliente Sulphur Company” with a bathhouse and hotel that became well known
among tourists to California. Revolutionary conflicts beginning in 1911 kept visi-
tors at home and a major flood in 1916 swept away the buildings. Interest in the
property remained, but the Argüellos retained ownership of both the springs and
a makeshift changing room located nearby, charging 25 U.S. cents to anyone who
wished to use them. In February 1921 a Tijuanense named Rodríguez Galeana,
allegedly “conniving” with Americans, filed a claim with the federal government
for the springs, arguing that they were national waters because they flowed within
the banks of the Tijuana River, and providing as evidence photographs of the 1916
flood that filled the river and covered the springs.5 The Rodríguez Galeana water
grab was rebuffed, but the boom in the business of mineral springs bathing and the
1920 prohibition of alcohol in the United States made the Agua Caliente springs
too attractive to leave undeveloped for much longer.
In 1926 three wealthy Americans teamed with Baja California governor
Abelardo L. Rodríguez (1923–30) to purchase the springs and a large parcel of
land around them from the Argüellos and build a sumptuous spa, hotel, restau-
rant, and casino complex, which opened its doors in June of 1928. Soon in Agua
Caliente there was a swimming pool, private bungalows, a horse racing track, a
golf course, and an airport to receive American tourists. Agua Caliente’s alcohol,
gaming, and nightlife attracted Hollywood’s famous and wealthy, as well as politi-
cal figures and gangland notables such as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. As gov-
ernor, Abelardo Rodríguez ensured the success of Agua Caliente by smoothing
political wrinkles, facilitating permits, and negotiating with labor organizations.
He also invested his own money in the enterprise, and dedicated state resources
140    chapter 8

Figure 17. “Manantial del Agua Caliente sobre la Margen Izquierda y dentro del Cauce del
Río de Tijuana,” c. 1920. With permission of the Archivo Histórico del Agua, Mexico City,
Mexico. AHA, AS, Caja 723, Exp. 10513.

to the construction of roads, the provision of electricity, policing, and other infra-
structures and services.
Rodríguez was a fellow sonorense, revolutionary, and close associate of General
Plutarco Elias Calles, who would be president from 1924 to 1928. Rodríguez rose
from poverty to become military commander of Baja California in 1921 and also
governor of that federal territory from 1923 to 1930. After Calles stepped down
from the presidency in 1928, he named a series of his allies to the position, includ-
ing Rodríguez. Rodríguez brought his experience with hot springs tourism to
Mexico City when he was named to take over the presidency after Pascual Ortiz
Rubio resigned halfway through his term. Rodríguez was installed as interim
president between 1932 and 1934 precisely because of his loyalty to Calles and his
followers, and quickly became involved in promoting the ex-president’s favorite
water tourism spot: Tehuacán, Puebla.
Calles and the political class of Mexico City popularized Tehuacán in the 1920s,
and by 1930 the city was bustling with tourists. Bathing in mineral springs and
feasting on the regional delicacy mole de cadera became symbolic of the privileges
of the new revolutionary elite that Mexican tourists hoped to emulate. With so
much money pouring into Tehuacán, it also became known for drinking, gambling,
and prostitution, activities that Rodríguez viewed as a normal part of the tourist
business.6 President Rodríguez further promoted the hot springs resort town by
dedicating federal money to building a paved highway from Puebla that reduced
 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico    141

the time in transit from Mexico City to a mere four hours. It was rumored that both
Rodríguez and Calles would stand to personally benefit from the highway, for they
had invested their own money in the mineral springs bottling plant built by José
María Garci-Crespo and in the luxurious spa hotel that he opened for business in
1934.7 This hotel—the Garci-Crespo—eclipsed the recently built Hotel Casino de la
Selva in Cuernavaca as the most luxurious watering spot in the Americas.
When Lázaro Cárdenas assumed the presidency in 1934 he stepped back from
the tourism development model, devoting state resources instead to productive
activities, especially agriculture. Aiming to marginalize Calles and the callistas, and
to limit the negative dimensions of tourism development, he outlawed gambling,
which was a principal economic interest of that group. Cárdenas closed the Agua
Caliente casino complex in 1935, but he actually supported a reformed version of
tourism development in the rest of the country.8 The Hotel Garci-Crespo thrived
without gambling, and, rebaptized as the Hotel Peñafiel in 1948 (a name shared by
the brand of mineral waters bottled on the site), continued as the premier vacation
spot in Mexico until the development of Acapulco by President Miguel Alemán,
who, expanding the sonorense water tourism development model, plowed federal
resources into building up that coastal resort for international and national visi-
tors in the late 1940s and 1950s.9
In one way or another, all the postrevolutionary presidents and politicians
viewed tourism as a desirable development strategy, and many combined their
state roles with personal investments. Pascual Ortiz Rubio, who served as secre-
tary of communications and public works in 1920–21, and as president for the two
years preceding Abelardo Rodríguez (1930–32), formed the Compañía Impulsora
de Acapulco with the goal of building a tourist hotel in that town. In 1935 Ortiz
Rubio created Campos Mexicanos de Turismo (CMT), which operated a hotel for
U.S. tourists on the Pan-American Highway in Ciudad Valles, San Luis Potosí. A
few years later, CMT bought a hot springs bathhouse and hotel in Ixtapan de la
Sal, with the plan to turn it into Mexico’s premier mineral springs resort and an
international tourist destination.

PA RT I N G T H E WAT E R S I N I X TA PA N D E L A S A L :
C OM M U N I T Y, C A P I TA L , A N D T H E S TAT E

Where politicians and investors eyed profits in mineral springs such as Agua
Caliente, Tehuacán, and Ixtapan, locals saw waters that had been used by their
families and communities longer than anyone could remember. These were very
different understandings of the value of waters, and in the town of Ixtapan de la Sal
that difference led to ongoing resistance to the development plans of businessmen
and politicians. Ixtapan de la Sal is today a tourist town lodged in the hills that
descend south from the Nevado de Toluca volcano in the state of Mexico, about
two hours away from Mexico City on the highway. It has scores of hotels that serve
142    chapter 8

a wide range of visitors, from wealthy residents of the cities of Toluca, Cuernavaca,
and Mexico City to humble campesinos from nearby towns. The landscape sur-
rounding Ixtapan is dotted with country houses for those who can afford them,
and growing neighborhoods for those who work in the town’s thriving tourist
economy. People come to Ixtapan de la Sal to enjoy the sun, the climate and most
importantly the waters. There are a multitude of swimming pools in hotels and
private houses, the Ixtapan Aquatic Park with its hot springs bathhouse, as well as
the hot spring pools of the Municipal Bathhouse in the town center.
None of this existed before 1930. For most of their history, the waters of Ixtapan
de la Sal’s multiple hot mineral springs were used for producing salt, and although
local people almost certainly bathed in the waters, there is no evidence that anyone
else did. There were five springs of importance, as well as a handful of tiny ones.
San Gaspar, El Bañito, and Santa Catarina springs were located near the town,
and the first two were developed early on into rustic pools. Four hundred and
fifty meters uphill to the north of town, a pond called Laguna Verde, also fed by
hot springs, was used by those bathers who sought a cure for communicable dis-
eases. The El Salitre spring was located half a kilometer south of Ixtapan, downhill
toward the town of Tonatico (which has its own springs). Freshwater was taken
from a small source near the San Gaspar springs, and, beginning around 1878, an
eighty-kilometer-long canal brought freshwater from the slopes of the Nevada de
Toluca to the towns in the region.10
The saline waters of the mineral springs of Ixtapan left thick deposits of salty
soil, and these, as well as the waters themselves, were used to make very pure,
white table salt that was sent as tribute to the Aztec kings by the Matlatzincas, and
in the colonial period was used for refining silver from the mines of Taxco and
Zacualpan to the south. The town had a church, and beginning in 1822 was the seat
of municipal government, but had very little freshwater, agriculture, and inhab-
itants. Salt-making using evaporation ponds—called “Ixtamiles” (“salt-fields” in
Nahuatl)—was still an important activity at the end of the nineteenth century,
but by 1930 was no longer a profitable business, and only lived on in artisanal
fashion to supply local markets based in barter.11 While the salt was a key product
of the town of Ixtapan, archival records indicate that the conflicts that arose were
focused on the use of land for the production of food and livestock.12
Between 1870 and 1930 the salty waters of Ixtapan slowly strayed from the orbit
of silver mines and were integrated into the tourism economy as the bathing boom
that swept Mexico and the world accentuated the value of Ixtapan’s heterogeneous
waters. In 1877 the Italian immigrant José Nosari identified Ixtapan de la Sal as a
good place for a spa that would ride the wave of popularity in mineral springs bath-
ing. He forged a contract with the municipal government for the rights to use the
mineral springs for 99 years, paying 100 pesos annually. Nosari sold this contract
in 1890 to Santiago Graf, a Swiss immigrant with similar pretensions who managed
the hot springs bathing business in Ixtapan de la Sal until revolutionary soldiers
Figure 18. “El Bañito: Al Fondo el Campo de Aviación, Ixtapan de la Sal, Mex.” Courtesy
of Luis René Arizmendi, Ixtapan de la Sal, México. Date unknown. Note the saltworks in the
background.

Figure 19. “El Bañito: Una Pileta Circular.” With permission of the Archivo Histórico
del Agua, Mexico City, Mexico. AHA, AS, Caja 2058. Exp. 31075, pp. 187–96 (June 2, 1941),
“Informe #79.”
144    chapter 8

attacked the town, killed five townspeople (the “martyrs of 1912”), and drove the
tourists away. Graf abandoned his business between 1912 and 1918 and could not
pay the accumulated rent, so the municipal government contracted with a series
of three Mexican businessmen between 1919 and 1930 to exploit the hot springs.13
José Reynoso, an engineer working in the silver mines of Zacualpan in the
1920s, was impressed by the potential for a bathing business in Ixtapan and had
the governor of Mexico State, Coronel Filiberto Gómez, broker a deal with the
municipal president José Vergara to acquire the rights to the hot springs, as well as
the right to build hotels and bathhouses on municipal land and to use freshwater
for these tourism projects. In turn, Reynoso promised to deliver fifteen percent of
his profits to the municipality.14 The state government spent 4,500 pesos to reno-
vate the pools at the San Gaspar springs, and Reynoso pitched in 1,500 pesos for
dressing rooms. Reynoso dedicated much more of his money to buying land and
building a 40,000-peso, 34-room hotel next to the San Gaspar springs, which came
to be known as the Hotel-Baths of Ixtapan de la Sal.15 State and municipal govern-
ments also contributed to developing a much smaller pool at the El Bañito spring
that was simply a circular, four-meter-wide hole dug in the earth. The remaining
undeveloped springs were also used for drinking and bathing by visitors attracted
to Ixtapan by the curative properties of the waters. Reynoso built a rectangular
pool at the Santa Catarina spring, with dressing rooms, for the locals.16
Reynoso’s Hotel-Baths of Ixtapan de la Sal brought an unprecedented influx of
visitors to the town, despite the fact that the road was still a dirt track, and his busi-
ness flourished, serving as many as a hundred people a day by 1941. Other hotels
and pensiones for tourists sprouted up during the 1930s, with their guests using the
bathing facilities of the Hotel-Baths Ixtapan de la Sal, but almost never the rustic
baths at El Bañito and Santa Catarina, which served the poorer, local population.
Another entrepreneur, Carlos Rodríguez, arrived in 1933, buying land around the
town and investing 100,000 pesos to build the Hotel Casa Blanca.17 By 1940 there
was another hotel, as well as guesthouses run by American and German immi-
grants that catered to foreign visitors.
The increasing control over the business of bathing exercised by outsiders was
paralleled by a shift in the legal status of Ixtapan’s springwaters, from municipal
property to federal property. Mexico’s 1926 irrigation law declared much of the
country’s waters to be the property of the nation, and initiated a process of cen-
tralization by which local actors were required to either apply for confirmation
of existing uses of waters or ask the government for a new concession of those
now-national waters. Just as it had in Topo Chico, Nuevo León (chapter 7), this
process led to confusion and conflict in Ixtapan de la Sal. Ixtapan’s hot spring-
waters were declared national property by President Pascual Ortiz Rubio in 1932
with the assertion that they flowed into the Río Balsas, but neither the municipal
government nor Reynoso himself seemed to have been aware of that change, or
the requirement that any existing uses of nationalized waters be registered with the
 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico    145

secretary of agriculture within the five-year period that followed.18 Because of the
failure to register these existing uses within five years, the municipality of Ixtapan
de la Sal lost rights to the springs, and the contract with Reynoso for those rights
was thus null and void.19

José Vergara was angry. As municipal president, in 1930 he had signed the
Municipality of Ixtapan de la Sal to a 25-year contract with José Reynoso, in which
the businessman was given almost total control over the waters of the town, in
exchange for fifteen percent of the profits generated by those waters. Now only a
year later he was sitting in the office of a notary public in Tenancingo, lodging a
claim to the bathhouse and the land where the San Gaspar springs bubbled up.
The land and springs were “property and possession” of the people of Ixtapan
“since forever,” testified residents Juan Hernandez and Onofre Morales. Vergara
felt cheated by Reynoso, who had convinced him through “tricks and false prom-
ises” that the business would provide a healthy income to the municipality. He
could see the money flowing into Ixtapan de la Sal, with outsiders buying land
and building houses and hotels, but only a pittance for the townspeople. It was
time to fight.

Source: AHA, AN, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075 (1939); Escrituras de Propiedad (1933);
AHA, AS, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075, pp. 151–55, Vergara to Olivier Ortiz.

The problematic legal status of Ixtapan’s hot springs soon became apparent in the
context of a struggle between national businessmen and local townspeople to con-
trol the benefits of bathing tourism in Ixtapan. In 1933, a year after José Vergara
signed the contract with Reynoso, the municipal government registered a claim
to the land and buildings of the Hotel-Baths Ixtapan de la Sal with a notary public
in Tenancinco. When the five-year window for claiming existing water uses with
the federal government closed in 1937, the municipal government asked that the
secretary of agriculture recognize its right to waters that “have been used since
before anyone can remember as public baths.”20 In 1938 the municipal govern-
ment filed concession requests for all the springs in Ixtapan, pointing out to the
secretary of agriculture and development (Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento,
or SAF) that since 1932 they were national waters and that neither Reynoso, the
municipality, nor anyone else had ever filed a request for their concession. The
municipality also tried its luck with other branches of government, filing a claim
with the Department of Indigenous Affairs, and even writing to the president.21 The
secretary of agriculture and development, charged with managing national waters
through its General Directorate of Waters (Dirección General de Aguas), ruled in
1939 that both Reynoso and the municipal government had failed to formalize their
146    chapter 8

claim to the national springwaters of Ixtapan, and recommended that the towns-
people form a cooperative to ask for the concession to supply a modern bathhouse.
The presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) was a period of social reform,
marked by the nationalization of the oil industry and large landholdings, the
strengthening of labor unions, and the creation of collective farms. The SAF,
which controlled the concession of waters, was especially supportive of peasant
economic initiatives during this period, and so José Vergara and the townspeople
of Ixtapan stepped up the pressure on Reynoso, hiring anarchist lawyer and rev-
olutionary precursor Enrique Flores Magón to represent them.22 They formed a
cooperative, and filed a new request for water to supply a community bathhouse,
and with the profits, to improve the road to Ixtapan, clean up the town for tourism,
and build a school, library, and hospital. At the same time, the municipal govern-
ment withdrew its request for the waters, in the knowledge that Mexican law at the
time privileged cooperatives over others requesting to use natural resources. In a
strange irony, the municipal government found itself arguing that it had no right
to the waters and that the federal government did (thus invalidating the contract),
and Reynoso ended up arguing that the water belonged to the municipality (and
therefore his contract was valid). As documentation of the multiple legal issues
piled up on the desks of the somewhat bewildered and hesitant SAF officials, the
townspeople grew increasingly hostile to Reynoso and his Hotel-Baths.
Faced with the knowledge that his contract with the municipal government of
Ixtapan de la Sal was invalid, that the springwaters were national property, that
the town was determined to recover them, and that the federal government was
generally supportive of such actions, Reynoso looked for a way out. He found it in
1940, through an offer by the company Campos Mexicanos de Turismo (CMT) to
transfer title of the Hotel-Balneario Ixtapan de la Sal in exchange for 70,000 pesos
of stock in the company.23 What made the CMT’s offer attractive was that its boss
was Pascual Ortiz Rubio, ex-president of the Republic (1930–32) and highly con-
nected leader of the growing tourism industry. Ortiz Rubio had clear channels of
influence with the federal government, all the way up to the president of Mexico,
and on multiple occasions between 1941 and 1945 wrote directly to President Ávila
Camacho, or Minister of Agriculture Marte R. Gómez, to advance the interests of
the CMT. He was also familiar with Ixtapan de la Sal, for it was he who, as president
of the Republic, authorized the nationalization of the town’s springwaters in 1932.24
Ortiz Rubio created CMT in 1935, pooling money from a group of investors to
buy and operate the “Hotel Valles,” in Ciudad Valles, San Luis Potosí, a habitual
stop for American tourists heading south on the Pan-American Highway.25 His
development vision included hotels for international tourists and the infrastruc-
ture to serve them. CMT’s project to develop Ixtapan centered on enlarging the
existing hotel from 34 to 100 rooms, expanding the bathhouse on the San Gaspar
springs, bringing more potable water to the hotel, and convincing the federal gov-
ernment to pay his company to build a paved highway to connect Ixtapan with
 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico    147

the urban centers of Toluca, Mexico City, and Cuernavaca and the tourists sites
of Metepec and the Grutas of Cacahuamilpa.26 CMT bought the Hotel-Baths
Ixtapan de la Sal in 1940, and Ortiz Rubio soon presented Ávila Camacho with
his proposal to rebuild it as a more modern, international hotel that would look
like a “European spa.” A chemical analysis of the waters of San Gaspar springs
showed them to be rich in sulfates, potassium and sodium chlorides, and use-
ful to treat rheumatism, gout, insomnia, and maladies of the nervous system and
skin.27 Echoing the nineteenth-century discourse of the water cure, Ortiz Rubio
promised “a sanatorium built with all the required and most up-to-date scientific
knowledge.”28 But the focus was on tourism. It was to be, he confided to the presi-
dent, part of a major development that included the sale of properties for country
houses, a highway to Mexico City and Cuernavaca, and a redesigned town layout.
Along with convincing the federal government, Ortiz Rubio and the CMT also
had to negotiate with the people of Ixtapan de la Sal, who declared their opposi-
tion to the 1930 contract with Reynoso (now with CMT) even before the ink had
dried. By 1940 the town organized a cooperative and formulated its own develop-
ment plan, and Ortiz Rubio, sensing the seriousness of the community’s resistance,
incorporated some of the elements of this counter plan into a compromise offer. In
exchange for disbanding the cooperative, the CMT offered to build a school in the
town, and to give a free parcel of land to the municipality for enlarging the bath-
house at San Gaspar. Flores Magón rejected the offer on behalf of the cooperative.
In mid-June 1941, after years of uncertainty, the federal government ruled on
the situation. The lawyers of the SAF determined that the Reynoso-municipality
contract was valid, but that neither party acted to confirm rights to the water after
their nationalization in 1932, and thus neither had rights. Following from this, the
municipality had no legal basis by which to pass its rights to the cooperative. The
rights to the waters were still the federal government’s to award, and President
Ávila Camacho ruled, in a Presidential Accord, that the state of affairs would con-
tinue, with the CMT enjoying the use of the San Gaspar springs, but under the
assumption that it would make a major investment to build a bathhouse and hotel
“with all the modern conditions and comforts.”29 Ávila Camacho reminded Ortiz
Rubio of the importance of the “hydrotherapeutic center of Ixtapan de la Sal” for
the national strategy of tourist development, and told him that if the CMT could
not make such an investment, the water rights would be assigned to someone who
could “offer the hope of prosperity both for the locality and for the country’s tour-
ist industry.”30 Sensing the legitimacy and power of the position the community
had established over the previous years, the president also moved to protect exist-
ing free access by locals and “the poor and needy” to the other hot springs in
Ixtapan—El Bañito, Santa Catarina, and Laguna Verde.
The Presidential Accord spurred both the CMT and the townspeople to present
development plans for Ixtapan that heeded its goals. The CMT, emboldened by
the accord, filed its plan along with requests for water from San Gaspar, El Salitre,
148    chapter 8

El Ojito, and the freshwater spring.31 The cooperative promised much the same:
to build the highway, expand the bathhouse, beautify the town for tourists, and
build “campgrounds for tourists . . . chalets or bungalows . . . and fields for ten-
nis, basketball, golf, etc.” They would publicize the town internationally in Spanish
and English, stressing the “curative properties of the waters,” and proceeds from
tourism would build schools, a theater, a hospital, a library, and other community
services. The government reiterated that the waters would be given in concession
to the agent who could raise the capital for investment in a first-rate tourist hotel
and bathhouse.32 Flores Magón replied that it was unconstitutional to make the
concession of the mineral springwaters to the cooperative conditional on its eco-
nomic capacity to develop them, and maintained that it had legal precedence for
using the waters for development.33 The state, he argued, had placed its desire for
tourist development above the law.
The most important requirement of the Presidential Accord was that whoever
controlled the springs would invest large amounts of capital in developing them.
The CMT offered ledger sheets and corporate reports as evidence that it could
deploy the necessary funds, but the townspeople could only promise the secretary
of agriculture that once the water concession was awarded, the cooperative would
sell 60,000 pesos of bonds to build the bathhouse. The hotel, they maintained, was
not necessary because there were already hotels in Ixtapan. This argument, and
the claim that the town could raise the capital, was met with skepticism, and the
government rejected the townspeople’s petition on the basis that “it did not offer
sufficient hope of viability.”34
Struggling to raise money, the townspeople turned to the next biggest business-
man in Ixtapan after the CMT, Carlos Rodríguez, owner of the Hotel Casa Blanca.
In 1942 Rodríguez submitted a request for a concession of waters of the Santa
Catarina spring, along with a plan to build two swimming pools, a free one that
satisfied the Presidential Accord’s requirement for access by townspeople and the
needy, and another for tourists whom he would charge entry.35 He presented him-
self as a man of the people who brought prosperity to the town through his hotel,
and offered to invest 500,000 additional pesos in rebuilding that hotel and the new
bathhouses at the Santa Catarina spring.36 The municipality, seeing its chances to
control the springs growing slimmer, declared its support for Rodríguez’s plan. On
the other hand, CMT director Pascual Ortiz Rubio wrote a letter to President Ávila
Camacho vehemently protesting the plan for contravening the Presidential Accord,
encroaching on the CMT rights established by the 1930 Reynoso-Municipio con-
tract, and promoting unhygienic bathing practices.37 Ortiz Rubio hoped to per-
suade the president to order Secretary of Agriculture Marte R. Gómez, an old
agrarista sympathetic to peasant causes, to reject Rodríguez’s development plan
and his request for the springwaters, but when this pressure went unheeded, the
CMT filed an appeal (amparo) in court.38
 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico    149

Carlos Rodríguez shifted uneasily in his hard wooden chair in the office of the
Directorate of Waters, in the Tacubaya neighborhood on the western outskirts
of Mexico City. Rodríguez brought his lawyer to the meeting with Olivier Ortiz,
manager of the Campos Mexicanos de Turismo, and officials of the Secretaría de
Agricultura y Fomento, but it did not make him feel much better about the situ-
ation. He was up against Pascual Ortiz Rubio, former president of Mexico, and
he felt outgunned in this struggle over the springwaters of Ixtapan. The “junta
de avinencia” that he had come to participate in was supposed to reach a com-
promise settlement, and Rodríguez hoped it would, to avoid further legal costs
and delays in the construction of his planned bathhouse in Ixtapan de la Sal.
He had followed the letter of the law, including that of the Presidential Accord,
but the Campos Mexicanos de Turismo fiercely opposed any competition for the
business of bathing in Ixtapan, and word had it that the Ministry of Agriculture
only entertained his development plan and request for waters because the sec-
retary himself, Marte R. Gómez, refused to bend under the pressure applied by
President Ávila Camacho in support of Ortiz Rubio. As the CMT lawyer spoke,
it became increasingly clear that there was no chance they would move forward
with his plans. The CMT had already agreed with the government of Mexico State
on a plan to develop Ixtapan, and Rodríguez was not part of it. Worse still, Ortiz
accused him of trying to dispossess the townspeople of the Santa Catarina spring;
and he knew that the CMT employees were going around town undermining
his efforts by telling people that they were “selling their birthright for a plate of
lentils.” Well, they will likely win in the end, he thought, but he was not going to
give in at this meeting.

Source: AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, pp. 178–95, Transcript of the Junta de
Avinencia (October 27, 1943).

At the beginning of 1944, the legal status and control over the hot springs of
Ixtapan de la Sal was still not defined. Three years earlier President Ávila Camacho
had validated the status quo possession and use of the San Gaspar spring by the
CMT, but the SAF had never awarded a definite concession of those waters to
anyone. In the midst of this uncertainty, the municipal government denounced to
Ávila Camacho and Marte R. Gómez the water-grab attempted by CMT and, in an
about-face, rejected Rodríguez’s request for the Santa Catarina spring.39 When the
SAF decided to award Rodríguez the concession to the Santa Catarina spring, they
made it contingent on the approval of the municipal government, which was not
forthcoming. Instead, the municipal government returned to the SAF with its own
plan to build a pool at the Santa Catarina spring.40 In an effort to buy the compli-
ance of the municipal government, the CMT brought its own plan for a municipal
150    chapter 8

bathhouse at the Santa Catarina spring, and offered the land, the engineers, and
500 pesos toward its construction. Much like the Presidential Accord reached in
1941, the SAF ruling in 1944 left the situation in Ixtapan unresolved.41
A solution, however, was already being negotiated between the municipal gov-
ernment and Arturo San Román, a businessman with deep roots in Ixtapan. San
Román enjoyed a certain measure of local trust because his father, Atilano San
Román, had arrived in the town in 1890. More important, however, is that he was
also able to muster the capital required to turn Ixtapan into a tourist destination,
and his connections to state and federal governments helped him push through
decisions.42 San Román’s vision for Ixtapan went far beyond rebuilding the Hotel-
Balneario, and included the creation of a country club–style development outside
of town known as Nueva Ixtapan, with homes built around a new reservoir. To
support this project, he planned to ask for concessions not only of the hot springs,
but of the freshwater from the canal that supplied the town and its agriculture.43
San Román was able to work with the CMT and municipal, state, and federal
governments to line up all the pieces of his development plan in the space of a few
years. In August of 1944 Ortiz Rubio wrote his friend President Ávila Camacho to
ask him to modify his Presidential Accord so that the CMT and San Román could
share the project to build a first-rate hotel and balneario, with CMT rebuilding the
hotel and San Román investing in the bathhouse and processing the water conces-
sion.44 In September San Román asked the municipality to sell him lands on which
the San Gaspar Balneario was located, and in October the CMT sold San Román
its water rights to the San Gaspar, El Ojito, and El Salitre springs. Still, the munici-
pal government and San Román remained at odds over a number of issues, so on
December 21, 1944, they presented their arguments for arbitration by the governor
of the state of Mexico, Isidro Fabela.
Fabela’s ruling was accepted by all parties. They agreed to revise the payment
for the land and waters of San Gaspar that had been stipulated in the 1930 pact
between Reynoso and the municipal government. San Román was required to
pay for and build two balnearios, a low-cost one for locals at the Santa Catarina
spring, and a free one at the El Bañito spring for the needy. Income from the
Santa Catarina baths would be administered by an independent board, and used
to maintain both baths and make other material improvements in the town. The
municipality would, furthermore, provide land to San Roman outside of town for
a dam to store water from the freshwater canal to be used by the town, and cede to
him the property rights of the parcels of land upon which the San Gaspar springs
and its hotel and balneario were located. The transactions compelled by the state’s
arbitration established the definitive rights to land and water that paved the way
for capital investment in Ixtapan de la Sal.
Springwaters were a crucial ingredient of the development project in Ixtapan
orchestrated by San Román, but so too was freshwater. The nineteenth-century
canal that brought water to the fields and homes of Ixtapan was insufficient to
supply the growth of San Román’s New Ixtapan complex, so he worked with
 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico    151

Figure 20. View of the Nueva Ixtapan, S.A. housing development, c. 1955. With permission of
the Archivo Histórico del Agua, Mexico City, Mexico. AHA, AN, Caja 1204, Exp. 16337.

state and federal governments to improve the infrastructure and increase sup-
ply. As early as April of 1944—long before the arbitration ruling was delivered by
Governor Fabela—San Román presented the SAF with plans for the construction
of hydraulic infrastructure that would convey and store water from the Barranca
del Calderón, and convinced Augusto Hinojosa, Mexico State’s senator to the
National Congress, to order a study of the freshwater available in that barranca
and the eighty-­kilometer canal.45 As soon as the arbitration decision was delivered
by Fabela, the SAF sent an engineer to identify water that could be brought to
Ixtapan, and once it was determined that there was an available amount of 238
liters per second, San Román filed a request for that amount. He also asked to
make temporary use of 1,000 liters per second of the flow of the Barranca to drive
electricity-generating equipment.46 The rest of the towns along the canal were told
that gates would be installed to limit their flows of water, and in 1946 San Román
received a fifty-year concession from the SAF to provide potable water to his new
tourist development.47
The arbitration decision resolved the long struggle between the municipal gov-
ernment and outside developers over the San Gaspar springs, and satisfied the
terms of Ávila Camacho’s Presidential Accord by channeling capital into the cre-
ation of a center of international tourism in Ixtapan de la Sal. The fate of Ixtapan’s
other springs remained unclear, however. San Román offered to build two bath-
houses on the El Bañito and Santa Catarina springs, but Carlos Rodríguez already
held the conditional concession of these waters from the SAF. Once San Román
152    chapter 8

Figure 21. Municipal bathhouse, Ixtapan de la Sal, c. 1965. Courtesy of Luis René Arizmendi,
Ixtapan de la Sal, Mexico.

took charge of the development of Ixtapan, the SAF attempted to take that con-
cession away, but Rodríguez lodged a legal appeal and Mexico’s Supreme Court
ruled that the concession was valid even without the permission of the municipal
government.48

“In reality, the town itself has denied, with weapons drawn, the efforts by Mr.
Rodríguez to take possession of the spring. The feelings about this issue are so
extreme that I feel Mr. Rodríguez’s life would be in danger if he continues any
further. . . . The town is not willing, for any reason, to sell or give land to Mr.
Rodríguez, and the result is that Mr. Rodríguez has no property on which to build
his planned bathhouse.”
—Victor Peredo, federal government official, 1953

Source: AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (December 4, 1953), Memorandum,
Victor Peredo.
 Spa Tourism in Twentieth-Century Mexico    153

Years of conflict ensued, as Rodríguez attempted to move forward with his plan
to build the bathhouses against the sustained opposition of the townspeople and
the municipal government.49 He excavated the pools in late 1946, but in March
of 1947 construction was interrupted by “various townspeople,” and his workers
refused to resume their labors. Rodríguez accused José Vergara of scheming with
“others from the town interested in obtaining the concession” and petitioned the
municipal, state, and federal governments for protection. Witnesses testified that
in February of 1950 a group including the municipal president and some police
officers stopped the work “at gunpoint.”
Rodríguez received no response to these requests for protection, and the works
remained abandoned until 1951, when the SAF finally revoked his water conces-
sion and building permit.50 The conflicts between Rodríguez, San Roman, and the
townspeople continued to simmer, and 1954 the municipal government passed a
resolution to prohibit access by Rodríguez and his workers to the municipal lands
on which the springs and bathhouse project were located.51 Rodríguez finally gave
up, and in the late 1950s the municipality and townspeople secured the concession
of the El Bañito and Santa Catarina springs and built the municipal bathhouse
foreseen in the arbitration decision of 1945.

C O N C LU SIO N S

The deal reached between San Román and the municipal government of Ixtapan
de la Sal enabled politicians and businessmen to develop the town as a tourist des-
tination, and secured some benefits from that development for the townspeople by
providing them with a share of the business of bathing through the construction of
a municipal bathhouse. In this way, the long struggle of the townspeople to main-
tain control or access over their local mineral springs was successful. Nevertheless,
the townspeople participated in the economic development of Ixtapan in a clearly
subaltern position. Once the land and water rights were established, San Román
was able to organize, with the support of his allies in the state and federal gov-
ernments, an elite tourist development scheme that utilized the waters and labor
of locals to generate profits for him and his family.52 When the canal was finally
opened in 1960, all the towns in the region protested the loss of water to Nueva
Ixtapan and asked for their previous concessions to be restored.53 By this time,
however, the spa tourism model promoted by the postrevolutionary government
since the 1920s was a reality, and tourism in Ixtapan sucked the region’s land, labor,
and waters into its orbit.
The strategy of placing mineral springs tourism at the heart of economic devel-
opment has been successful across Mexico, and owes its success to the persistence
of strong cultural values for virtuous waters. In the town of Oaxtepec, Morelos, for
example, an enormous vacation center and water park was built in the 1960s by
the federal government’s Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS)—the Centro
154    chapter 8

Vacacional de Oaxtepec. Oaxtepec’s hot springs are only one of many hydraulic
features of the Centro Vacacional, which sports an Olympic-size swimming pool,
a diving pool with platforms up to ten meters high, various wading pools, sports
fields, and numerous restaurants, bars, hotels, and cabins. In 2017 the range of
water-based activities expanded even further, as the Six Flags Company opened
its “Hurricane Harbor” theme park on this public property. Nearby, in the city of
Cuautla, Morelos, the hot springs of “Agua Hedionda” have been developed into
a vacation destination, also with a wide range of activities. The state of Hidalgo
is famous for its hot springs bathing complexes. And so on, throughout Mexico.
During the twentieth century, hot springs throughout the country were con-
verted into balnearios run by ejidos, town governments, the federal government,
and private businesses. The National Water Archives in Mexico (Archivo del
Agua) holds hundreds of pages of documents concerning dozens of hot spring
during this period, when plans were drawn up to turn them into tourist centers,
or perhaps to develop bottling plants using their waters. In each setting a differ-
ent bargain was struck between local inhabitants and outside businessmen eager
to cash in on these virtuous waters. It certainly matters who ends up controlling
these waters and the businesses that make use of them, as the sheaves of archival
documents chronicling struggles over mineral springs can attest. But regardless of
the particular outcome of primitive accumulation, bottling, and spa tourism, the
ongoing popularity of these heterogeneous waters is evidence of the deep attrac-
tion they continue to exercise. It would be impossible to understand the political
ecology of mineral springs without considering the virtues of these waters.
 9

Virtuous Waters in the Twenty-First

Century

Every weekend people from Toluca, Mexico City, and other nearby areas pour into
Ixtapan de la Sal to take the waters. Those who can afford it go for a few days of
relaxation around a pool at a fancy hotel or private home. Many families will visit
the Ixtapan Aquatic Park, a somewhat-pricey waterpark with slides, rides, and res-
taurants, but it is mostly the old folks who head for a soak at the park’s hot springs
bathhouse. The older people remember when the bathhouse was connected to the
hotel, before the San Román family divided their property and the aquatic park
was built to appeal to younger generations of customers seeking more exciting
interactions with Ixtapan’s waters. The aquatic park also has a luxurious spa with
thermal waters to serve upscale guests. Visitors to the town with more modest
resources perhaps choose a smaller hotel with a pool, and those with less will stay
at a budget hotel or pension in town and walk to the municipal bathhouse, which
is about a third of the price of the waterpark, but still offers various pools, a water-
slide, and a restaurant.
Many of those at the municipal bathhouse come to Ixtapan to soak in the thera-
peutic hot springwaters. “The waters are salty,” a middle-aged man told me as we
lounged in one of the two small hot pools at the municipal bathhouse, “not like the
sulfurous waters of Hidalgo. These ones are good for reducing blood pressure.” The
small hot pools were considered therapeutic by most everyone sitting in them, and
the cooler large pool at the center of the complex was more for fun, as evidenced
by the kids, babies, and parents splashing around. An older woman said that the
salty waters of the hot pool were good for her rheumatism, and she moved to let
the water flow over her as it emerged from an opening in the floor at the center of
the pool. I hauled myself from the hot pool to the murky, cool waters of the nearby

155
156    chapter 9

Figure 22. A weekend afternoon in the Municipal Bathhouse, Ixtapan de la Sal, 2009.
­Photograph by author.

mud pool, where a few men and women sat plastered with the dark brown mud of
the hot springs. “It removes toxins,” an overweight young man told me as we sat
with the mud drying on our faces, looking a little like aquatic raccoons. A pair of
well-dressed young women had set up a table nearby, looking out of place in their
high heels. They were selling some sort of dietary supplement concocted from
nopal cactus, a traditional food in highland Mexico reputed to alleviate diabetes.
I followed a busload of elderly folks as they filed into the bathhouse and entered
a separate hydrotherapy room, guided by a younger woman in white pants and
jacket who looked and acted like a nurse, giving instructions about how best to
take advantage of the healing powers of the Jacuzzi jets and waters. The elderly
patients were taking a day trip to treat assorted complaints: mostly high blood
pressure, aching joints, and obesity. I soon found out that access to this room
required an additional fee, and it was clearly set apart in its ambience from the
ludic space of the bathhouse’s main pools. The hydrotherapy techniques were pre-
scribed and required more control. Like the hot spring pools it was a healing space,
but the bathing practices were regimented and it had a more clinical feel.
Heterogeneous waters continue to attract people to their virtues, but the knowl-
edge and use of these waters is not as common, perhaps, as it once was. Ixtapan
 Virtuous Waters in the Twenty-First Century    157

Figure 23. Hydrotherapy room, Municipal Bathhouse, Ixtapan de la Sal, 2009. Photograph
by author.

de la Sal might be the best-known spa town in Mexico. It is close to Mexico City
and continues to thrive as a hub of tourism, mostly national. Ixtapan’s waters still
attract many visitors, but the great majority of today’s visitors to the town will
not bathe in the mineral waters that made it famous. The number of hot springs
has not increased, while the numbers of hotels, pools, spas, and visitors have sky-
rocketed over the last century to accommodate growing numbers of tourists. The
upscale guests at the Hotel Ixtapan, for example, might choose an aromatherapy
massage at the new “Holistic Spa,” or maybe take a yoga class or sunbathe by the
pool. Those still interested in soaking in the mineral waters will have to leave
that hotel through a gate to get to the old bathhouse, now on the property of the
neighboring Ixtapan Aquatic Park, or they may use the individualized bathing
rooms of the marble-and-onyx-covered Ixtapan Spa, built in the 1960s. The old
bathhouse is something of a relic, “rubble” of a bygone moment.1 The Ixtapan Spa
from the 1960s is dated in its appearance, and its mineral baths do not, the hotel
recognizes, reflect “new health and fitness trends” such as those offered at the
“Holistic Spa”.2 Some other boutique hotels in Ixtapan have built temazcal steam-
baths for guests seeking the curative and spiritual dimensions of pre-Hispanic
and indigenous bathing practices. Ixtapan’s mineral springs still bubble from the
158    chapter 9

ground, but most people choose a bathing experience in which mineral waters do
not play a central role.
Visitors to other historically famous mineral springs in Mexico encounter a
similar situation. Little remains of the bathhouse row in Aguascalientes, and in
Tehuacán the efficacious, virtuous waters that drew people to the town for c­ enturies
are rather hard to find these days. The source of the Peñafiel mineral waters can be
seen but not touched or even photographed, deep in an underground cavern below
the bottling plant owned now by the Dr. Pepper–Snapple group. The El Riego and
Garci-Crespo hotels are long gone, and the hotels that serve visitors do not offer
mineral waters for bathing; they might offer other present-day “spa” services such
as massages, face masks, or chocolate “therapy.”3 The mineral waters of Tehuacán
are now only accessible for bathing at the San Lorenzo spring, which supplies a
shady, popular waterpark two kilometers from the town center. At San Lorenzo,
the communitarian form of ejido property has conserved the springs as a com-
mon-pool resource and has served as a barrier to primitive accumulation. Topo
Chico, on the other hand, is now an industrial zone of the city of Monterrey, and
the only hint that hot springs once sprang forth there is a private museum dedi-
cated to the history of the Topo Chico mineral water company. There are plenty of
spas advertised in Monterrey—“nail” spas, “day” spas, “medical” spas—but none
of these involve bathing, drinking, or otherwise interacting with mineral waters.
The mineral spring in the “El Pocito” church in La Villa de Guadalupe can be
smelled and not seen: its sulfurous scent wafts up from a well that remains grated
to prevent anyone from interacting with its waters. “El Pocito” is now known for
its architecture rather than for the fact that it enshrines a centuries-old engage-
ment with the heterogeneous waters of the Valley of Mexico. The nineteenth-
century bathhouse founded by Liceaga in front of the train station in La Villa
de Guadalupe is long vanished, and the springwaters that served as a pilgrimage
destination for centuries are only symbolically present in the elaborate fountains,
pools, and waterfalls that have been built into the side of the Tepeyac hill that rises
above the Basilica of Guadalupe and its uber-iconic depiction of the Virgen de
Guadalupe. These waters are off-limits to visitors, who will also find no holy water
offered at the entrance of the various churches at the site. But traditions are slow
to fade, and every day dozens of young parents bring their babies to be baptized in
the “Bautisterio” (baptismal chapel), a large building next to the basilica dedicated
solely to that important watery sacrament.
In Peñón de los Baños, the thermal mineral waters have simply been neglected
as capital chases better chances of accumulation. But because they are not used
for bottling or spa tourism, the therapeutic uses of the waters stand out. The bath-
house at Peñón de los Baños is today located on the dark, decrepit, and austere
bottom floor of a brick and cement building in a drab working-class neighborhood
in Mexico City. The modest business serves folks who seek a medical treatment;
there is no luxury, no leisure. Instead there are private rooms with placeres and hot
 Virtuous Waters in the Twenty-First Century    159

Figure 24. El Pocito, Villa de Guadalupe, 2017. Photograph by author.

water drawn from a well—the springs, exhausted by groundwater pumping, no

longer bubble to the surface (see Figure 1). Everyone who goes there is convinced
of the medicinal efficacy of bathing in the waters, but few others even know about
them, least of all doctors. Like the tourism industry, the medical profession no
longer depends on mineral waters such as those of Peñón or Ixtapan; it seems that
most doctors share the view of water as homogeneous and inert, good for washing.
Despite the general decline of mineral spring bathing during the twentieth
century, heterogeneous waters still exist, and people are still drawn to them for
cultural reasons that have accumulated over centuries. Drinking is the most com-
mon interaction with mineral waters today, and it is clearly enjoying an immense
upwelling of popularity. In a few cases—Tehuacán, Peñafiel, and Topo Chico—the
mineral springs have been captured for bottling, and these waters are indeed well
known. Like all bottled waters today, mineral waters appeal to consumers because
of their specificity—the fact that they are not tap water. Bottled waters are felt to be
purer and safer than tap water, and those that claim an attractive origin—“bottled
160    chapter 9

at the source”—are especially desired. The “Tehuacán” brand, for example, says
that its water originates at the top of the Pico de Orizaba, a nearby volcano.4
Mineral waters such as Topo Chico, Peñafiel, and Tehuacán carry these connota-
tions of purity derived from geographical specificity, but their perceived virtues
go beyond purity to include the efficacy of their mineral contents. Mineral water
is seen to help digestion, and the chemical contents of the waters are sometimes
displayed on the label as if they were medicine. Long-standing ideas about the
influence of the environment on human health animate the ingestion of bottled
mineral waters, and mineral waters remain virtuous and efficacious in the minds
of many consumers, in Mexico and around the world.
Bathing is now a less-common form of interaction with mineral waters,
but many hot springs remain popular as mass tourist destinations, and long-­
standing concepts of the healthfulness of immersion in these waters are still held
by those who visit them. I spent many afternoons, for example, in the hot spring
pools of the Balneario Municipal in Ixtapan de la Sal, chatting with the visitors.
Sitting together in the hot pools, we would discuss the virtues of the waters, and
how they acted upon the body to ease problems of gout, arthritis, high blood
pressure, circulation, etc. The salt in the water was good for allergies; the dis-
solved carbonate gas soothed the nerves. The mud we smeared on faces, arms,
and bodies kept our skin smooth and youthful. Scientific proof of the efficacy
of the waters was in plain sight: hung on the walls were analyses of their chemi-
cal composition. Also common, however, were stories of miraculous cures. One
woman told of a deep scar that was made invisible by the waters; another wit-
nessed a man enter in a wheelchair and leave walking. Bathing in these waters
was a deeply social activity, sitting elbow to elbow in the water and talking about
how it soothed our maladies.
What can we learn from these waters and cultures? What is their place in the
twenty-first century? I have approached this complex multifaceted history from
an historical, anthropological perspective that views human relations with the
environment in a holistic way, informed by political ecology and its emphasis on
social organization, conflict, and materiality. The history of waters and cultures
in Mexico shows complex dialectics: heterogeneity and homogeneity; curing and
contagion; social and individual; and a subject/object dynamic that posits water as
both an inert substance to be controlled by humans, and as an efficacious, agen-
tial substance that works changes on humans. One of the trends in this history is
toward the expansion of infrastructure and an associated individualization of our
contact with water. Bathing for cleanliness has moved from public spaces to private
ones. Shared bathhouses have given way to private bathrooms in people’s dwell-
ings. But this is not a unilineal process of water displacing waters; homogeneity
has not abolished heterogeneity. Rather, the effort to create a sanitized, uniform,
public water during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually strengthened
the identities and values of specific waters, and we see that social bathing for fun,
 Virtuous Waters in the Twenty-First Century    161

fitness, and therapy continued to flourish alongside the shower. Sit in any hot
spring in Mexico, and this is evident.
Waters define social groups and their boundaries. Despite the individualization
of bathing, our engagements with water are still organized around group identi-
ties. Soaking in a small pool of water with dozens of perfect strangers is something
that many people are uncomfortable with, because intimacy probes the borders of
race, class, ethnicity, sex, and gender that our society is built upon. Wealthy clients
of Mexico City’s bathhouses in the 1790s bathed in private placeres, away from the
temazcales and shared waters of the plebe. A century later the rich bathed in the
privacy of their own homes in order to escape the massification of bathing. Social
and sexual intimacy in the temazcales of New Spain was enough to engender a full-
scale colonial clampdown; sex in the baths during the Porfiriato was greeted with
a similar reaction. Boundary work is also busy at the borders of race and class. In
Ixtapan de la Sal, the municipal bathhouse was built to cater to locals and people
of more humble economic means; the hot springs at the Hotel Ixtapan served the
wealthy. Today, the town’s hot springs serve a wide cross-section of society, but
those with a lot of money retire to more exclusive spas that have no mineral waters
at all.
Along with the social distinctions that organize social practices of bathing, an
important dynamic in the history of heterogeneous waters is the ebb and flow of
interest by capital in them. The bathhouse at Peñón was renovated and served
wealthy clientele in the late eighteenth century, and then again in the late nine-
teenth century. All along, however, humble Mexicans made use of the waters,
pushing back against businessmen and governments in order to retain access to the
common resource. Hydraulic opulence in the late-nineteenth century fomented
the business of bathing and made these waters accessible to many more Mexicans.
In Spain and other areas of Europe, elite interest in mineral waters declined during
the mid-twentieth century, when public health systems enabled wide access by the
middle class and even poor. With the decline of the welfare state, elite spas are once
again on the rise, as these commons are privatized and investors eye the business of
bathing as an attractive way to tap the wealth of the rich. Throughout Mexico, how-
ever, access to mineral springs remains fairly open, conserved that way in many
cases by municipal and ejidal ownership and administration. It remains to be seen
if another wave of primitive accumulation will turn the popular spas of Mexico
into luxury resorts, but the strength and persistence of Mexican water cultures and
their traditions of access make such an outcome seem unlikely.
Cultures of waters deserve our attention. Most of what we know about our rela-
tion to water has to do with the macroenvironmental aspects of irrigated agriculture
and urban water systems. But waters move through our bodies and intimate social
spaces as well, and scholars have largely ignored these topics. As the world con-
fronts a generalized water crisis, intimate engagements with waters will surely play
a role in reconstructing a more sustainable relationship with the liquid. Already the
162    chapter 9

strategy of increasing supply through the construction of ever-expanding storage

and conveyance infrastructures has been rejected in favor of demand management,
which pivots around reducing domestic water use in urban contexts. More efficient
bathing practices are in order; shorter, less frequent, perhaps shared engagements
with water. Ancestral water cultures present a range of affective values that may
point us toward less destructive uses. We fill our bathroom drains and public water
infrastructures with soap and shampoo, but we might not be comfortable about
dumping these substances in a pond that we drink from and swim in. A return to
feeling and valuing the specificity of heterogeneous waters and promoting of inter-
actions with them could limit the destructive aspects of the modernist illusion of
unlimited, homogeneous water disconnected from our bodies and lives.
Virtuous waters, past and present, convey elements of more sustainable rela-
tionships with the environment and with each other. Unfortunately, building a
sustainable relationship to water is not simply a question of replacing one cultural
element with another. Heterogeneity, for example, contributes content to our dys-
functional and maladaptive relationship with water, as evidenced by the recent
boom of bottled waters. These waters are sold as unique and geographically spe-
cific: sometimes they are, often they are not. Regardless, the production of billions
of plastic water bottles drives up costs for the liquid, pollutes our rivers and oceans,
and generates fabulous profits for the few while defunding the public water sys-
tems that do the same job much more efficiently.5 Heterogeneity lies at the heart of
the commodity form, and this complicity promises to cause mischief as we chart
a course toward more local, more intimate engagements with the hydrosphere.
Renovating our relationship with our waters requires a focus on, well, relations:
with water but also with each other. The search for profit that lies at the heart
of our economic system will relentlessly define the liquid by the part it plays in
the accumulation process. It may be a resource that provides rents through irri-
gated agriculture, or it can generate profits through bottling and sale as a com-
modity. However, the quest for profit propels the business of bathing and bottling
unevenly, in cycles and surges, never fully eradicating the relations of community
and cooperation that ensure access to springs at places such as Peñón and Ixtapan,
or erasing deep-seated ideas about the virtues of the liquid. The control of mineral
waters by some people through law, science, technology, and sometimes outright
force was and still is resisted with some success by other groups of people. As we
struggle toward a more sustainable relationship to waters, we may find that these
deep, long-standing relationships that everyday people have with waters and with
each other can serve as a fountain of ideas and practices for building more virtu-
ous cultures of waters.
 Note s

1 WAT E R S / C U LT U R E S

1. Jackson 1990.
2. Johanson 1997.
3. Brewer 2004; Girón Irueste 2006.
4. Kauffman 1959.
5. Mora 1992.
6. Harley 1990; Palmer 1990.
7. Archibald 2012; Blásquez and García-Gelabert 1992; Olmos 1992.
8. Corbin 1988; Gandy 2002.
9. Coley 1979, 1982; Hamlin 1990; Porter 1990.
10. Anderson and Tabb 2002; Brockliss 1990; Chambers 2002; Gil de Arriba 2000;
Mackaman 1998; Lempa 2002; Mansen 1998.
11. Brockliss 1990; Cayleff 1987; Dávalos 1997; Goubert 1989; Harley 1990; Melosi 1999;
Rodríguez Sánchez 2006; Rodríguez 2000.
12. Bacon 1997; Jarrasse 2002; Walton 2012.
13. Jennings 2006; Lopes Brenner 2005; Quintela 2004.
14. Corak and Ateljevic 2007.
15. Goubert 1989; Vigarello 1988.
16. Corbin 1994.
17. Wiltse 2007.
18. Gandy 2002, 2014; Melosi 1999.
19. Clark 1994.
20. Erfurt-Cooper and Cooper 2009; Cátedra Tomás 2009.
21. Hamlin 1990.
22. Hamlin 2000; Linton 2010.
23. Linton 2010: 81–89.

163
164    Notes

24. Reisner 1993.

25. Palerm 1973; Steward et al. 1955; Steward 1949; see Walsh 2012 for a discussion.
26. Adams 1966; Geertz 1973; Lansing 1987; Hauser-Schaublin 2003.
27. Aboites 1987; Pisani 2002; Walsh 2008; Ward 2003; Wolfe 2017; Worster 1985.
28. Gelles 1994; Guillet 1992; Hunt 1988; Mabry 1996; Mitchell 1976.
29. Hunt et al. 1976; Lansing 1987; Trawick 2003.
30. Gleick 2010; Kaplan 2008; Wilk 2006.
31. Gleick 2003; Reisner 1993; Zetland 2009.
32. Melville and Whiteford 2002.
33. Walsh 2011.
34. Arrojo 2006; Martínez Gil 1996.
35. Arrojo 2006; Aguilera Klink 1998, 2006.
36. Strang 2004.
37. Wiltse 2007.
38. Jennings 2006; Blakeslee 2010.
39. Kaplan 2008; Wilk 2006; Gleick 2010.
40. Gandy 2104; Linton 2010.
41. Bennett 2010; Latour 2005; Wagner 2013.
42. Wolf 1972; Greenberg and Park 1994; Steward et al. 1955; Steward 1949; Wolf and
Palerm 1955; Escobar 1999.
43. Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on class and culture shape this view (Gramsci 1971;
Crehan 2002, 2016).

2 BAT H I N G A N D D OM I NAT IO N I N T H E E A R LY
M O D E R N AT L A N T IC WO R L D

1. Birrichaga Gardida 2004.

2. Roberto Melville, personal communication, 2003.
3. García Sánchez 2004; Tortolero 2000.
4. Rojas 1988, 1993.
5. Palerm 1973.
6. Palerm 1973.
7. Pineda Mendoza 2000: 21–55.
8. Birrichaga Gardida 2004: 94–95.
9. Gibson 1964; González Jacome 2007; Palerm 1955; Wolf and Palerm 1955.
10. García Sánchez 2004.
11. Alcina Franch 1994; López Austin 2012.
12. Noriega Hernandez 2004.
13. Schendel 1968.
14. Cervantes Salazar 1985, quoted in Birrichaga Gardida 2004: 294.
15. Schendel 1968: 39–43.
16. Bonfil 1987.
17. Miller 1962.
18. Pliny 1948.
19. Casal García and González Soutelo 2010: 31.
 Notes    165

20. Williams 1977.

21. Lara García 1997: 23.
22. Brewer 2004: 185.
23. Girón Irueste 2006.
24. Girón Irueste 2006: 84.
25. Girón Irueste 2006: 82.
26. Jennings 2006: 170–73.
27. Ruíz Somavilla 1992, 1993.
28. Lara García 1997: 22.
29. Ruíz Somavilla 1992: 172.
30. Ruíz Somavilla 1993: 168–71.
31. Anderson 2002: 114.
32. Ruíz Somavilla 1993: 66.
33. Cited in Girón Irueste 2006: 94.
34. Ruíz Somavilla 1993.
35. Ruíz Somavilla 1992.
36. Vigarello 1988.
37. Porter 1990.
38. Ruíz Somavilla 2011: 4.
39. Theimer-Sachse 2000: 205.
40. López Austin 1985: 36.
41. De Landa [1566] 1973: 39.
42. De Landa [1566] 1973: 39.
43. Rodríguez Rivera 1945.
44. Cárdenas [1591] 1945: 71.
45. Avaleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005; Morales Padrón 1949.
46. Vovides, Linares, and Bye 2010.
47. García Samper 1997.
48. Morales Padrón 1949.
49. Hodgson 2004; Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005.
50. Sauza Vega 2008.
51. De Landa [1566] 1973: 55.
52. Henshaw 1910.
53. Cresson 1938; Mason 1935.
54. Romero Contreras 2001: 134.
55. Cresson 1938; Alcina Franch et al. 1980; Houston 1996; Matarredona Desantes 2014;
Noriega Hernandez 2004; Ruíz Somavilla 2011; Virkki 1962.
56. Romero Contreras 2001.
57. Alcina Franch et al. 1980.
58. Cited in Romero Contreras 2001: 134.
59. Cited in Romero Contreras 2001: 134.
60. Cited in Romero Contreras 2001: 134.
61. Groark 1997: 16.
62. Silva Prada 2002; Alberro 1992.
63. Rodríguez 2000.
166    Notes

64. Lanning 1983.

65. Gruzinski 1985: 277–78.
66. Silva Prada 2002.
67. Silva Prada 2002: 49.
68. Silva Prada 2002: 12.
69. Candiani 2014.
70. Musset 1992: 14.
71. Birrichaga Gardida 2004.
72. Pineda Mendoza 2000.

3 P O L IC I N G WAT E R S A N D BAT H S I N
E IG H T E E N T H - C E N T U RY M E X IC O C I T Y

1. Foucault 2009.
2. Candiani 2012 revives a notion of class based in modes of production. I prefer a rela-
tional idea of class: Gramsci 1971; Thompson 1978.
3. Endfield 2012.
4. Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de Mexico (AHCM), Ayuntamiento, Aguas, Docu-
mentos Diversos para el Arreglo del Ramo, Vol. 29, Exp. 22.
5. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Aguas, Documentos Diversos para el Arreglo del Ramo, Vol.
29, Exp. 22.
6. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Aguas, Documentos Diversos para el Arreglo del Ramo, Vol.
29, Exp. 21, “Relación.”
7. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Aguas, Documentos Diversos para el Arreglo del Ramo, Vol.
29, Exp. 22, “Declaración.”
8. Gazeta de México 49 (September 18, 1795): 409, cited in Martínez Reguera 1892: 287.
9. Rodríguez 2000: 121–40.
10. Rodríguez 2000: 134–35.
11. Rodríguez 2000: 137.
12. Alzate Ramirez [1792] 1894: 29.
13. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Aguas, Documentos Diversos para el Arreglo del Ramo,
Vol. 29, Exp. 22.
14. Bando de Revillagigedo 1793. Copy of the broadside consulted in the Archivo Históri-
co de la Escuela Nacional de Medicina, Mexico City, Mexico. The text was also published in
the Gazeta de México (August 31, 1793): 428–32.
15. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 6 (September 17,
1793): Fray Juan Galindo to Policía.
16. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 12, “Diligencias
practicadas”; De Valle-Arizpe 1949: 397–400.
17. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 1 (October 17, 1778).
18. Bando de Revillagigedo 1793.
19. Rodríguez 2000.
20. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 12, “Diligencias
practicadas. . .”
21. Ruíz Somavilla 2011; Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005.
 Notes    167

22. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 3 (June 8, 1792).
23. Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera 1998.
24. Carreón Nieto 1999: 126.
25. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 23 (1814).
26. Bando de Revillagigedo 1793.
27. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Aguas, Documentos Diversos para el Arreglo del Ramo,
Vol. 29, Exp. 22, “Declaración.”
28. Gandy 2014; Vigarello 1988.
29. AHCM, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 5 (1793), “Causa formada. . . ” In
dramatizing this scene I have used a bit of interpretive license.
30. AHCM, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 5 (1793), “Causa formada. . . ”
31. AHCM, Policía, Baños y Lavaderos, Vol. 3621, Exp. 12 (November 20, 1750).
32. AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3621, Exp. 21 (1809). A bathhouse on the Calle de
la Canoa run by Padres del Carmen was found guilty—by failing to provide a toilet—of
forcing washerwomen to defecate in its public space, a doubly troubling act involving the
aversion to nudity and to excrement.
33. AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3621, Exp. 14 (1797).
34. AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3621, Exp. 20 (1804).
35. Pulido Esteva 2011.
36. The dictums discussed by Hira de Gortari Rabiela (2002) are: Ordenanza de la di-
visión de la Nobilísima ciudad de México en cuarteles, creación de los alcaldes de ellos y reglas
de su gobierno (1782); De Enfermedades políticas de la Nueva España que padece la capital
de esta Nueva España en casi todos los cuerpos de que se compone y remedios que se le deben
aplicar para su curación si se quiere que sea útil al Rey y al público (1785); and Discurso sobre
la policía de México. Reflexiones y apuntes sobre varios objetos que interesan la salud pública
y la policía particular de esta ciudad de México, si se adaptasen las providencias o remedios
correspondientes (1788). The 1782 and 1788 documents were generated by the Oidor Ladrón
de Guevara; the 1785 treatise was written by Hipólito Villoroel.
37. Miller 1962.
38. Agostoni 2003: 3–5.
39. Porter 1990; Jennings 2006.
40. Porter 1990; Hamlin 1990.

4 E N L IG H T E N M E N T S C I E N C E O F M I N E R A L SP R I N G S

1. Wagner (2013) reflects the growing importance to the anthropology of water of

Bennett (2010), Latour (2005), and other proponents of ontological and new materialist
approaches.
2. Solano 1988.
3. Apenes 1944.
4. Ewald 1985.
5. Olivera 1988.
6. Olivera 1988.
7. Olivera 1988: 76.
8. Hamlin 1990; Linton 2010.
168    Notes

9. Aceves Pastrana 1993, 1996.

10. Beaumont 1772: 7.
11. Beaumont 1772: 54.
12. Beaumont 1772: 99.
13. Beaumont 1772: 102.
14. Beaumont 1772: 104.
15. Beaumont 1772: 27.
16. Beaumont 1772: 95.
17. Beaumont 1772: 95.
18. Beaumont 1772: 96.
19. Beaumont 1772: 9.
20. Margadant 1986.
21. Carreón Nieto 1999: 117
22. Carreón Nieto 1999: 117.
23. Gazeta de México 3, no. 1 (January 8, 1788).
24. Gazeta de México, no. 23 (November 17, 1784): 192.
25. “Valladolid,” Gazeta de México 4, no. 22: 205–9.
26. “Valladolid,” Gazeta de México 4, no. 22: 206.
27. “Valladolid,” Gazeta de México 4, no. 22: 206
28. Aceves Pastrana 1993: 90.
29. Aceves Pastraña 1993: 90.
30. Cervantes de Salazar 1554, cited in Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005: 42.
31. Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005: 43.
32. Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005: 44.
33. Morales Padrón 1949: 703.
34. Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005: 59.
35. Dumont and de Torres 1762: 9.
36. Gazeta de México 6, no. 78 (November 19, 1794): 645.
37. Romero-Huesca and Ramírez Bollas 2003; Zedillo 1984.
38. Rodríguez 2000: 172.
39. Gazeta de México 6, no. 79 (November 19, 1794): 654.
40. Ocampo 1794.
41. Cited in Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005: 54.
42. Cited in Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005: 54.
43. Aveleyra Arroyo de Anda 2005: 58.
44. Ocampo 1794: 656.
45. AHCM, Ayuntamiento, Policía en General, Vol. 3630, Exp. 218 (April 3, 1827): Jose
Maria Manero to Juez Policía.

5 G R OU N DWAT E R A N D H Y D R AU L IC O P U L E N C E I N
T H E L AT E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U RY

1. García Cubas 1904; De Valle-Arizpe 1949.

2. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 1: 284–98.
3. Geels 2005.
 Notes    169

4. Wiltse draws on the ideas proposed by political scientist Robert Putnam (1995), who
famously showed that Americans in the 1990s went “bowling alone” rather than in the
leagues that thrived during the mid-twentieth century.
5. Río de la Loza [1863] 1911: 212; Río de la Loza and Craveri 1858: 18; Orozco y Berra
1855: 91.
6. Río de la Loza [1863] 1911: 212.
7. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 2: 330–31.
8. AHCM, Aguas, Excepción, Vol. 44, Exp. 1.
9. AHCM, Aguas, Mercedes en Arrendamiento, Vol. 71, Exp. 496; AHCM, Aguas, Mer-
cedes en Arrendamiento, Vol. 70, Exp. 441; AHCM, Aguas, Mercedes en Arrendamiento,
Vol. 71, Exp. 550; AHCM, Aguas, Mercedes en Arrendamiento, Vol. 75, Exp. 1073.
10. Scholarly works describing well drilling in France, Germany, and England circu-
lated in the Mexican scientific community. Río de la Loza and Craveri 1858, citing Héricart
de Thury 1829.
11. Talavera Ibarra 2004.
12. Peñafiel 1884: 48–49, 55; “Noticia Geológica” 1858; Barcena 1885: 262.
13. Kurlansky 2003: 27.
14. Río de la Loza and Craveri 1858: 17.
15. Barcena 1885: 266; Buenrostro 1875: 179.
16. Del Valle 1859: 25–26.
17. “Pozos Absorventes” 1856.
18. Peñafiel 1884; Talavera Ibarra 2004; Río de la Loza [1863] 1911: 220–21.
19. Talavera Ibarra 2004: 301; Peñafiel 1884: 153–54.
20. Talavera Ibarra 2004: 301.
21. Peñafiel 1884: 51; Barcena 1885.
22. Peñafiel 1884: 191.
23. Peñafiel 1884: 50.
24. Orvañanos 1895: 221.
25. Barcena 1884; Peñafiel 1884: 13–15.
26. Talavera Ibarra 2004: 296.
27. Orozco y Berra 1858; Peñafiel 1884: 50.
28. Peñafiel 1884: 12–14, 35–36.
29. AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 36, Exp. 153.
30. “Noticia Geológica” 1858: 27; Talavera Ibarra 2004.
31. Talavera Ibarra 2004: 303–5.
32. Río de la Loza [1863] 1911: 231.
33. AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 48, Exp. 22, “Sobre Propiedad de la Al-
berca de Chapultepec”; Río de la Loza and Craveri 1858: 89.
34. AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 48, Exp. 23, “Acuerdo de la Junta de
Hacienda.”
35. AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 48, Exp. 1 (June 11, 1820), “Visita de Ojos.”
36. AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 48, Exp. 22 (September 30, 1870).
37. AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 48, Exp. 25, “Jose Amor y Escandón se
queja”; AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 48, Exp. 29, “Varios vecinos del barrio
de San Miguel Chapultepec.”
170    Notes

38. Gray 1878; Haven 1875: 224–25.

39. AHCM, Aguas, Foráneas Chapultepec, Vol. 48, Exp. 10 (November 18, 1870).
40. Kingsley 1874: 260; Bárcenas 1885: 267.
41. Geiger 1874: 219–20.
42. Forbes 1851: 140.
43. Forbes 1851: 204.
44. Lyon 1828: 94.
45. Lyon 1828: 63.
46. Donnavan 1848: 22.
47. Domenech 1858: 272.
48. Gilliam 1846.
49. Forbes 1851: 139.
50. Geiger 1874: 48.
51. Ruxton 1847: 59.
52. Forbes 1851: 139.
53. Gilliam 1846: 202.
54. Conkling 1883: 212.
55. Blake and Sullivan 1888: 116.
56. Smith 1889: 64.
57. Crawford 1899: 61–63.
58. Crawford 1899: 62, italics original.
59. Jackson 1890: 210.
60. Baker 1895: 127.
61. Smith 1889: 64.
62. Blake and Sullivan 1888: 115–16.
63. Donnavan 1847: 22.
64. Case 1917: 85.
65. García Cubas 1904: 373.
66. Blake and Sullivan 1888: 40–42.
67. Ober 1883: 564–65.
68. Carson 1909: 136–37.
69. McCarty 1888: 214.
70. Beaufoy 1828: 70.
71. McCarty 1888: 183.
72. Geiger 1874; George 1877; Hale and Hale 1893.
73. Elton 1867: 30.
74. Iglehart 1887: 230.
75. Elton 1867: 30.
76. Elton 1867: 35.
77. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 2: 286.
78. Prantl and Groso 1901: 39.
79. Rogers 1893: 143.
80. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 2: 285.
81. Macías González 2012.
82. Website of the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de México, http://sacm.org.mx/
biografias/biografias-interior.asp?txtSocio = 03416 (retrieved August 12, 2016).
 Notes    171

83. Rivera Cambas 1880: 284.

84. Paz 1882.
85. De Cuéllar 1889; Paz 1882.
86. Talavera Ibarra 2004.
87. AHCM, Mercedes en Arrendamiento, Vol. 143, Exp. 7000 (May 3, 1894); AHCM,
Mercedes en Arrendamiento, Vol. 143, Exp. 7000 (September 3, 1894).
88. Williams 1992; Wiltse 2007.
89. AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3638, Exp. 991 (March 13, 1891).
90. AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3639, Exp. 1064 (1895).
91. AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3638, Exp. 991 (March 21, 1891).
92. AHCM, Policía en General, Vol. 3638, Exp. 991 (June 6, 1898).
93. Iglehart 1887: 275.
94. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883: 284.
95. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883: 284.
96. Prantl and Groso 1901: 39.
97. Peñafiel 1884, 1900.
98. Riva Palacio [1890] 2010.
99. Tenorio-Trillo 1996.
100. De Valle-Arizpe 1949: 412.
101. De Valle-Arizpe 1949: 425.
102. García Cubas 1904; Macías-González 2012.
103. George 1877: 128; Haven 1875: 224–25.
104. Pineda Mendoza 2000.
105. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 2: 319; Gray 1878: 59.
106. García Cubas 1904: 373.
107. Gray 1878: 59.
108. AHCM, Aguas, Vol. 48, Exp. 37 (June 6, 1892), J. Ceballos to Ayuntamiento.
109. Crawford 1889: 179.
110. Mintz 1985.
111. “La ‘Colonia de la Condesa’” (July 8, 1906), El Mundo Ilustrado 13(12).
112. Agostoni 2003, 2005.

6 C H E M I ST RY, B IO L O G Y, A N D T H E H E T E R O G E N E I T Y
O F M O D E R N WAT E R S

1. Aboites 2012; Aréchiga Córdoba 2004; Banister and Widdifield 2014; Linton 2010.
2. Latour 1993; Carrillo 2001.
3. Anderson and Tabb 2002; Green 1986; Mackaman 1998.
4. “Noticia Geológica” 1858.
5. Barcena 1885.
6. “Noticia Geológica” 1858.
7. In 1857, 200 wells in Mexico City produced 867 m3/hr, or 4.33 m3/hr per well. In
1883 there were 483 wells; at the same rate of 4.33 m3/hr, they produced 2,091 m3/hr. Total
aqueduct flow at that time was 1,237 m3/hr (Peñafiel 1884: 50). By comparison, in 2013 the
extraction of water from the aquifer of the Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City (Zona Met-
ropolitana de la Ciudad de Mexico—ZMCM) was about 34 m3/second, or 122,400 m3/hr.
172    Notes

Extraction from the entire Valley in 2013 was approximately 58 m3/second, or 208,800 m3/
hr, about twice the rate of recharge (Gómez Reyes 2013: 19).
8. Coley 1979, 1982; Porter 1990.
9. Miller 1962.
10. Pauer 1872.
11. Masson 1864.
12. Hay et al. 1870.
13. Urbán Martinez and Aceves Pastrana 2001: 37.
14. Río de la Loza and Craveri 1858: 17–18.
15. “Noticia Geológica” 1858: 28.
16. Río de la Loza and Craveri 1858: 11.
17. Río de la Loza [1863] 1911: 216–27.
18. Corbin 1988.
19. Río de la Loza [1863] 1911: 224.
20. Río de la Loza [1863] 1911: 225.
21. Barcena 1885.
22. Ross 2009: 575.
23. Peñafiel 1884: 121.
24. Peñafiel 1884: 122.
25. Mackaman 1998.
26. Hardy 1829: 503.
27. Hardy 1829: 416.
28. Hardy 1829: 416.
29. Gilliam 1846: 194.
30. Weiss and Kemble 1967: 5.
31. Durie 2006.
32. Moreno 1849; Sáez de Heredia 1849.
33. Sáez de Heredia 1849: 19.
34. Sáez de Heredia 1849; González Urueña 1849: 4.
35. Sáez de Heredia 1849: i.
36. Sáez de Heredia 1849: ii.
37. For example, Dumont and Torres 1762.
38. Sáez de Heredia 1849: 4.
39. Nogueras 1849: prologue.
40. González Urueña 1849.
41. González Urueña 1849: 17–24; Moreno 1849.
42. Lugo 1875: 7.
43. Lopez 2012; Schifter Aceves 2014.
44. “Valladolid” 1790: 207.
45. Aceves Pastrana 1993: 90.
46. De la Cal y Bracho 1832: ix.
47. Masson 1864: 209.
48. Masson 1864: 213.
49. Antomarchi 1835.
50. Gayuca 1843.
 Notes    173

51. Xavier A. Lopez y de la Peña, “El último médico de Napoleon Bonaparte en Aguas-
calientes, México,” http://medicinaaguascalientes.blogspot.com/search?updated-min =
2013–01–01T00:00:00–08:00&updated-max = 2014–01–01T00:00:00–08:00&max-results
= 11 (retrieved July 7, 2016).
52. Masson 1864: 177.
53. Masson 1864: 175.
54. Tort 1858.
55. León 1882.
56. Jennings 2006; Rodríguez Sánchez 2006.
57. Lobato 1884.
58. Peñafield 1884.
59. Lobato 1884: xii.
60. Lobato 1884: 23.
61. Lobato 1884: xiii.
62. Lobato 1884: 188.
63. Lobato 1884: 98–99.
64. Lobato 1884: 193–94.
65. Lobato 1884: 213.
66. Lobato 1884: 212.
67. Lobato 1884: 94.
68. Rivera Cambas 1880–1883, vol. 2: 306.
69. Gaceta Médica de México 22 (1887): 70.
70. Delacroix 1865. I thank Eric Jennings for pointing this out.
71. “Acta Numero 6,” Gaceta Médica 22 (1886): 38.
72. Gaceta Médica 22 (1886): 35–40, 47–55, 70.
73. Sosa 1889a.
74. Orvañanos 1895; Liceaga 1890.
75. Macías-González 2012: 29.
76. Jennings 2006.
77. Sosa 1889b: n.p.
78. Anales del Instituto Médico Nacional 5 (1894): 82.
79. “Forjadores” 2011; Escotto Velazaquez 1999; Liceaga 1949.
80. Liceaga and Gayol 1898: 842.
81. Liceaga 1949: 152; Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Salud (AHSS), Fondo Be-
neficencia Pública, Hospitales, Hospital General, Caja 2, Exp. 22 (1903), “Pago de útiles.”
82. Lobato 1884: 100–106; Bárcenas 1885.
83. Liceaga 1892.
84. Gaceta Médica 26 (1891): 231–32; Ross 2009.
85. Gaceta Médica 26 (1891): 232.
86. Tenorio-Trillo 1996.
87. Liceaga 1892.
88. Prantl and Groso 1901: 40.
89. Liceaga 1892.
90. “El Balneario del Riego,” El Mundo Ilustrado 1906; Armendaris 1902.
91. Sosa 1889b: n.p.
174    Notes

92. Aguilar 1885: 190.

93. García Cubas 1904: 372.
94. Lugo 1875; Huerta 1883; Michaus 1893; Marquez Landa 1901; Mayer 1906.
95. Mayer 1906: 11.
96. Castillejos 1908.
97. Thomas de la Peña 1999.
98. Prantl and Groso 1901: 40–41.
99. Mayer 1906: 3.
100. AHSS, Fondo Salubridad Publica (FSP), Sección Servicio Jurídico (SSJ), Caja 3,
Exp. 11 (1924), “Proyecto de Reglamento de Baños Públicos del DF”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 3,
Exp. 16, Newspaper clipping: “El Baño más Higienico,” source and date unknown.
101. Liceaga 1949: 84–88, 92–93.
102. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 3, Exp. 16, Newspaper clipping: “El Baño más Higienico,”
source and date unknown.
103. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 21, Exp. 9 (April 9, 1930), Transcript of Meeting.
104. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 3, Exp. 11 (1924), “Proyecto de Reglamento de Baños Públicos
del DF.”
105. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 3, Exp. 16 (December 10, 1924), “Memo.”
106. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 3, Exp. 16.
107. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 3, Exp. 16 (January 23, 1926), Alberca Pane to Salubridad
Pública.
108. “Tabla Analitica” 1858: 53.
109. Orozco y Berra 1855: 86.

7 D I SP O S SE S SIO N A N D B O T T L I N G A F T E R T H E R EVO LU T IO N

1. Marx [1867] 1990, ch. 26; Harvey 2005, ch. 4.

2. Arreguín Mañon 1998; Walsh 2008; Wolfe, 2017.
3. Mazzarella (2003) argues that the specific, physical qualities of commodities—the
unique objects themselves, their use-values—are necessary to satisfy wants and thus are
­reinforced rather than erased by the otherwise homogenizing force of commodity exchange.
4. Lobato 1884: 187.
5. Hayes 2004.
6. “Las Aguas Minerales del Peñon,” Boletín de la Asociacion Financiera Internacional,
International Edition, English-Spanish 3, no. 1 (August 1907): 5.
7. Armendaris 1902; Bringas Nostti 2010.
8. “El Balneario del Riego,” El Mundo Illustrado 13, no. 2 (1906): 427.
9. Bringas Nostti 2010.
10. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Salud (AHSS), Fondo Salubridad Publica
(FSP), Sección Servicio Jurídico (SSJ), Caja 8, Exp. 19 (1927), “Prohibición de comercializar
las aguas gaseosas de Tehuacán”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 11, Exp. 1 (August 5, 1927), “Medellín
to Dr. Federico Falcón.”
11. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 8, Exp. 19 (August 12, 1927), “Hijos de Montt o Salubridad Pub
DF”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 8, Exp. 19 (August 13, 1927), “Laboratorio General, Sección de
Bacteriología”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 8, Exp. 19 (October 10, 1927), “Federico Falcón to Jefe
 Notes    175

Salubridad Publica DF”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 8, Exp. 19 (October 18, 1927), “Secretario
General to Señores Hijos de W. Montt.”
12. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 11, Exp. 1 (September 1, 1927), “De la Garza to Jefe Salud Publica.”
13. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 10, Exp. 2 (August 6, 1927), “Arturo Vargas to Jefe Consejo
Superior de Salubridad.”
14. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 11, Exp. 1 (November 23, 1927), “Agente Rafael Carrasco to
Salubridad Pública.”
15. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 9, Exp. 1 (August 2, 1927), “Luis Portillo to Jefe Salubridad
Pública.”
16. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 9, Exp. 1 (July 21, 1927), “Luis Portillo to Salubridad Publica”;
AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 9, Exp. 1 (August 31, 1927): “Luis Portillo to Salubridad Publica.”
17. AHSS, FSJ, SSP, Caja 36, Exp. 24 (April 4, 1933), Ramón Ramirez, “Las Fabricas Clan-
destinas,” pp. 1, 8.
18. AHSS, FSJ, SSP, Caja 36, Exp. 24, “Las Autoridades Deben Evitar el Contrabando y
la Fabricación de Sacarina”; El Universal (March 28, 1933), pp. 1–2.
19. AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 10, Exp. 6 (1927–30), “Dictámenes Servicio Jurídico . . . Servicio
de Comestibles y Bebidas”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 8, Exp. 19 (October 19, 1927), “Secretario
General de Salubridad Publica to Delegado Federal de Puebla”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 8, Exp.
19 (November 4, 1927), “Falcón to Salubridad Pública DF”; AHSS, FSP, SSJ, Caja 8, Exp. 19
(November 23, 1927), “Falcón to Jefe del Departmento de Salubridad Pública, DF”; AHSS,
FSP, SSJ, Caja 9, Exp. 1 (July 21, 1927), “Luis Portillo to Salubridad Pública.”
20. AHSS, FSJ, SSP, Caja 41, Exp. 15 (July 15, 1935), “Informe labores . . . sección cuarta.”
21. AHSS, FSJ, SSP, Caja 36, Exp. 24 (1933), “Exp. Relacionado al Campaña de Prensa.”
22. Arturo Mundet, “El Pro de la Salubridad,” El Universal (March 24, 1933); “Las Fábri-
cas Clandestinas,” El Universal (April 4, 1933), pp. 1, 8.
23. “Nino Murió por Tomar un Refresco con Sacarina,” El Universal, pp. 1, 5; AHSS, FSJ,
SSP, Caja 36, Exp. 24 (April 5, 1933).
24. AHSS, FSJ, SSP, Caja 45, Exp. 2 (July 25, 1935), “Informe”; AHSS, FSJ, SSP, Caja 45,
Exp. 2 (April 4, 1935), “Informe/Carta SP.”
25. Chittenden 1884; Baur 1959.
26. Valenza 2000: 34–43.
27. Jones 1967.
28. Ballou 1890; Bates 1887; Blake and Sullivan 1888; Ford 1893; Jackson 1890; Margati
1885; Smith 1889.
29. Ober 1883: 565, 625.
30. Archivo Histórico del Agua, México (AHA), Aguas Superficiales (AS), Caja 4581,
Exp. 60978; AHA, AS, Caja 4359, Exp. 57850 (March 1932), Servicio Consular Mexicano,
Oficina de Presidio Texas, “Informe Comercial.”
31. Garza Cantú 1892.
32. Randle received a credit from bankers in New York. AHA, Aguas Nacionales (AN)
Caja 1195, Exp. 16636 (August 9, 1900), Contract, Comunidad SBTC and Slayden, www.
tramz.com/mx/mo/mo.html (retrieved March 26, 2012).
33. Daniell 1892.
34. www.topochico.com/quien2.html (retrieved February 17, 2012).
35. Daniell 1892.
176    Notes

36. Hodson 1888: 776.

37. Texas Health Journal 4, no. 8 (February 1891): 235.
38. Cited in “Mineral Wells of Texas,” Texas Health Journal 5, no. 12 (June 1893): 315;
Valenza 2000: 41.
39. Mexican National Railroad Company 1893: 13.
40. Hodson 1888: 775.
41. AHA, AS, Caja 1195, Exp. 16636 (August 20, 1929); AHA, AS, Caja 1196, Exp. 16641
(April 12, 1930), Garza to Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento (SAF), www.topochico.com/
quien2.html (retrieved February 17, 2012). Randle was also the owner of Monterrey’s tram-
way system (Mora-Torres 2001: 123).
42. Morris 1902: 46.
43. www.topochico.com/lideraz.html (retrieved February 17, 2012).
44. AHA, AN, Caja 469, Exp. 4947 (April 8, 1931), Carlota Zambrano to SAF; AHA, AN,
Caja 469, Exp. 4947 (May 21, 1931), Alfonso de la Torre to SAF; AHA, AS, Caja 4905, Exp.
68434 (October 12, 1903), Pedro Treviño to SAF; AHA, AN, Caja 519, Exp. 5715 (August 28,
1903), “Informe.”
45. Holden 1994.
46. AHA, AN, Caja 4581, Exp. 60978.
47. AHA, AS, Caja 4519, Exp. 69882 (May 29, 1911), SAF to Secretaría de Obras Publicas
(SCOP).
48. AHA, AS, Caja 4905, Exp. 68434 (March 13, 1909), SCOP to SAF.
49. AHA, AS, Caja 1655, Exp. 24274 (December 28, 1926).
50. AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (August 1, 1930), Celso Cepeda to SAF.
51. Glennon 2004; Wolfe 2013.
52. I thank Luis Aboites for this clarification.
53. AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (August 1, 1930), Celso Cepeda to SAF; AHA, AS, Caja
1195, Exp. 16636 (October 23, 1929), “Solicitud de Dotacion de Derechos de Agua Caliente
y Ojo Caliente.”
54. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (July 24, 1930), “Informe.”
55. AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (August 1, 1930), Celso Cepeda to SAF.
56. AHA, AS; Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (August 1, 1930), Celso Cepeda to SAF.
57. AHA, AS, Caja 1665, Exp. 24274 (February 19, 1924), Comisión Nacional Agraria
(CNA) to Celso Cepeda; AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (August 1, 1930), Cepeda to SAF;
AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (February 25, 1924), CNA to Celso Cepeda.
58. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (September 7, 1926), Resolución Presidencial, Plu-
tarco Elias Calles.
59. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (April 9, 1929), “Informe 438.”
60. AHA, AS, Caja 1665, Exp. 24274 (December 28, 1926), Comisión Particular Admin-
istrativa Congregacion San Bernabe Topo Chico to CNA; AHA, AS, Caja 1665, Exp. 24274
(March 25, 1927), “Peticion.”
61. AHA, AS, Caja 1665; Exp. 24274 (May 21, 1927); AHA, AS, Caja 1665, Exp. 24274
(June 7, 1927); AHA, AS, Caja 633, Exp. 9139 (Novmeber 30, 1927), “Informe 480.”
62. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (December 5, 1927), SAF “Gestion #55.”
63. AHA, AN, Caja 470, Exp. 4963 (December 31, 1927), SAF.
64. AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (March 15, 1928).
 Notes    177

65. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (July 24, 1930), “Informe” Ing Leonel Lemus.
66. AHA, AS, Caja 1195, Exp. 16636 (November 18, 1930), “Informe 575.”
67. AHA, AS, Caja 1665, Exp. 24274 (February 25, 1929), Governor Jose Benitez to SAF.
68. AHA, AS, Caja 1665, Exp. 24272 (February 2, 1929), SAF to Garza Gonzalez.
69. AHA, AS, Caja 1196, Exp. 16641 (May 3, 1928), Contract Junta and Garza.
70. AHA, AS, Caja 1195, Exp. 16636 (October 23, 1929), Solicitud Derechos Agua Cali-
ente y Ojo Caliente.
71. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (February 18, 1929), SAF Informe #75.
72. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (July 16, 1929), SAF Informe #368.
73. AHA, AS, Caja 1655, Exp. 24274 (December 28, 1926); AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5737
(June 20, 1929), Vidaurri to Parres.
74. AHA, AS, Caja 1665, Exp. 24274 (January 2, 1929), Garza to SAF.
75. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (July 16, 1929), SAF Informe #368.
76. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (September 7, 1929).
77. AHA, AS, Caja 1195, Exp. 16636 (August 20, 1929), Solicitud.
78. AHA, AS, Caja 1196, Exp. 16641 (September 21, 1929), Solicitud.
79. AHA, AS, Caja 1195, Exp. 16636 (September 23, 1929), SAF to Congregation.
80. AHA, AN, Caja 489, Exp. 5201 (May 31, 1930), SAF to Compañía.
81. AHA, AN, Caja 489, Exp. 5201 (October 10, 1929), Informe 485.
82. AHA, AN, Caja 469, Exp. 4947 (May 21, 1931), Alfonso de la Torre to SAF, www.
topochico.com/lideraz.html (retrieved February 17, 2012).
83. www.topochico.com/lideraz.html (retrieved February 17, 2012).
84. AHA, AS, Caja 1196, Exp. 16641 (October 26, 1929), Acta Notarial; AHA, AN, Caja
522, Exp. 5735 (July 24, 1930), “Informe” Ing Leonel Lemus.
85. AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (October 23, 1929), Consejo Superior de Salubridad
to Congregation.
86. AHA, AS, Caja 271, Exp. 6547 (January 9, 1930), Cepeda to SAF; AHA, AS, Caja
11096, Exp. 16641 (October 10, 1930), CNA to SAF.
87. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (July 24, 1930), “Informe 278”; AHA, AS, Caja 11096,
Exp. 16641 (October 10, 1930), CNA to SAF.
88. AHA, AN, Caja 522, Exp. 5735 (October 10, 1931), Cepeda to Cedillo.
89. www.topochico.com/lideraz.html (retrieved April 20, 2016).
90. Arca Continental Company, Siempre Hacia Adelante, Informe Annual, 2015.
91. www.topochicousa.net/#the-legend (retrieved September 27, 2016).

8 SPA T OU R I SM I N T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U RY M E X IC O

1. Berger and Wood 2010.

2. Berger 2006.
3. Alonso Alvarez 2012; Anderson and Tabb 2002; Chambers 2002; Mackaman 1998;
Walton 2012.
4. AHA, AS, Caja 723, Exp. 10513 (March 1, 1921), Tomas Lamadrid to SAF.
5. Periódico Oficial, Distrito Norte de Baja California 33, no. 8 (February 10, 1921); AHA,
AS, Caja 723, Exp. 10513 (March 1, 1921), Tomas Lamadrid to SAF.
6. Gómez Estrada 2002.
178    Notes

7. Bringas Nostti 2010: 432–40.

8. Berger 2006.
9. Sackett 2010.
10. Arizmendi Domínguez 1999: 89, 101–3; AHA, AN, Caja 1204, Exp. 16337 (September
23, 1932).
11. AHA, AS, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075, pp. 187–96 (June 2, 1941), “Informe #79”; AGN,
Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (May 22, 1941), Ortiz Rubio to Ávila Camacho.
12. Arizmendi Domínguez 1999: 79–93.
13. AHA, AN, Caja 836, Exp. 10373 (September 30, 1953), Union de Defensa Economico
Social de Ixtapan de la Sal, México to Secretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos, Direccion de
Aprovechamientos Hidráulicos, Concesiones y Vedas, Region Sur, México DF.
14. AHA, AN, Caja 836, Exp. 10373 (May 20, 1930), “Acta Numero 10”; AHA, AN, Caja
580, Exp. 6463, “Asunto Contestando Oficio”; Aboites and Estrada 2004: 243.
15. AHA, AS, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075, pp. 151–55, Vergara to Olivier Ortiz; AHA, AN, Caja
2058, Exp. 31075, “Testimonio,” Juan Hernandez and Onofre Morales.
16. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, pp. 132–34 (August 14, 1943), CMT (Olivier Ortiz)
to Secretario of Ag y Fom (Marte R Gómez).
17. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, pp. 178–95 (October 27, 1943), Transcript of the
Junta de Avenencia.
18. Gaceta del Gobierno del Estado de México 40(33), May 18, 1932.
19. AHA, AS, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075, pp. 124–30 (March 15, 1939), “Memorándum sobre
Valides del Contrato.”
20. AHA, AN, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075 (1939), Escrituras de Propiedad (1933); AHA, AN,
Caja 2058, Exp. 31075 (October 24, 1938), Solicitud de Confirmación de Derechos al Man-
antial Laguna Verde.
21. AHA, AN, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075 (November 2, 1938), Antonino del Pilar to SAF;
AHA, AN, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075 (February 20, 1939), Graciano Sánchez to SAF.
22. AHA, AS, Caja 576, Exp. 6460, p. 108 (May 16, 1941), “Vergara to Enrique Flores
Magón.” For more on Magón, see Hart 1978.
23. AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (November 26, 1942), “Informe del Con-
sejo presentado a la Asamblea General de Accionistas”; AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354,
pp. 132–34 (August 14, 1943), “Compañía Mexicana de Turismo to Secretaría de Agricultura
y Fomento.”
24. AHA, AN, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075 (May 18, 1932); Gaceta del Gobierno del Estado de
México 33, no. 40 (April 23, 1932).
25. See Berger (2006) for a discussion of Ortiz Rubio and his relation to Luis Montes de
Oca, Banco de México president and promoter of tourism who organized credit for build-
ing hotels.
26. AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (February 21, 1941), “Ortiz Rubio to Ávila
Camacho.”
27. AHA, AS, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075, pp. 187–96 (June 2, 1941), “Informe #79.”
28. AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (May 22, 1941), “Ortiz Rubio to Ávila
Camacho”; AHA, AS, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075, pp. 259–60 (March 6, 1941), “CMT to Ávila
Camacho.”
29. AHA, AN, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075 (June 13, 1941).
 Notes    179

30. AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (July 28, 1941), Ávila Camacho to Ortiz
Rubio.
31. AHA, AS, Caja 2058, Exp. 31075, pp. 273–76 (April 29, 1942), “Informe #74.”
32. AHA, AN, Caja 580, Exp. 6463, pp. 109–10 (December 31, 1941), Memorandum, Jefe
de Departamento de Aguas.
33. AHA, AN, Caja 580, Exp. 6463, pp. 138–41 (April 27, 1942), Flores Magón to Direc-
ción General de Aguas, SAF.
34. AHA, AN, Caja 580, Exp. 6463, p. 143 (June 15, 1942), Javier Gaxiola to Sociedad
Cooperativa.
35. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (May 15, 1942), Solicitud de Concesión, Manantial
Santa Catarina; AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, p. 4 (July 16, 1942), Carlos Rodríguez to SAF.
36. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, pp. 119–23 (July 7, 1943), C. Rodríguez to Director
Dept Aguas SAF.
37. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, p. 8, Municipal President Ixtapan de la Sal to ­Carlos
Rodríguez; AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, p. 107 (October 30, 1942), Carlos Rodríguez
to SAF.
38. AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (April 9, 1943), “Memorandum,” Ortiz
­Rubio to Ávila Camacho; AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (May 23, 1943), Marte R.
Gómez (SAF) to Ávila Camacho; AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, pp. 132–34 (August 14,
1943), Olivier Ortiz to SAF.
39. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (January 18, 1944), Telegram, Ayuntamiento to SAF;
AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (January 17, 1944), Dario Hernandez to Ávila Camacho.
40. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (July 3, 1944).
41. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354, pp. 213–30 (February 15, 1944), “Informe #40.”
42. Daniela Barragán (January 22, 2015), “Perfil: ¿Quien es la familia San Román,
beneficiada en Edomex y afín a los Peña?” sinembargo.mx, www.sinembargo.mx/22–01–
2015/1225941 (retrieved September 21, 2016).
43. AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (August 18, 1944), Ortiz Rubio to Ávila
Camacho.
44. AGN, Presidentes, Ávila Camacho, 491/2 (August 18, 1944), Ortiz Rubio to Ávila
Camacho.
45. AHA, AN, Caja 1203, Exp. 16337 (September 14, 1945), “Informe #442.”
46. AHA, AN, Caja 1203, Exp. 16337 (May 3, 1946).
47. AHA, AN, Caja 1203, Exp. 16337 (August 23, 1945), “Informe”; AHA, AN, Caja 1203,
Exp. 16337 (September 14, 1945), “Informe #442”; AHA, AN; Caja 1203; Exp. 16337 (February
7, 1946), Dirección General de Aguas to SAF; AHA, AN, Caja 1204, Exp. 16337 (June 7, 1946),
Governor of Mexico State to Arturo San Román.
48. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (August 22, 1945).
49. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (October 16, 1946), Rodríguez to Dirección Gen-
eral de Aguas.
50. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (October 16, 1948), Rodríguez to SRH; AHA, AN,
Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (March 9, 1949), SRH to Rodríguez; AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354
(March 15, 1949), Rodríguez to SRH; AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (April 2, 1951), Rodrí-
guez to SRH; AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (April 24, 1951), Dirección General de Aguas
to Carlos Rodríguez.
180    Notes

51. AHA, AN, Caja 1206, Exp. 16354 (November 27, 1953), Informe.
52. Cruz Jimenez et al. 2012.
53. AHA, AN, Caja 1204, Exp. 16337 (August 15, 1960), Poblado Yerbasbuenas to SRH;
AHA, AN, Caja 1203, Exp. 16337 (August 27, 1967), Isauro Lugo to Comisión rio Balsas.

9 V I RT U OU S WAT E R S I N T H E T W E N T Y- F I R S T C E N T U RY

1. Gordillo 2014.
2. Interview, April 6, 2013, www.spamexico.com/history.php.
3. www.cantarranas.com.mx/spaserv.html, website of the Spa of the Hotel Cantarranas,
Tehuacán (retrieved October 25, 2016).
4. www.tehuacanusa.com/index-1.html, website of the Tehuacán bottled water com-
pany (retrieved October 25, 2016).
5. Gleick 2010.
 Biblio graphy

A R C H I V E S C O N SU LT E D

AFIIE. Archivo Fotográfico del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional

Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico.
AGN. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico.
AHA. Archivo Histórico del Agua, Mexico City, Mexico.
AHCM. Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, Mexico.
AHENL. Archivo Histórico del Estado de Nuevo León, Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico.
AHENM. Archivo Histórico de la Escuela Nacional de Medicina, Mexico City, Mexico.
AHSS. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Salud, Mexico City, Mexico.
AMIS. Archivo Municipal, Ixtapan de la Sal, Estado de México, Mexico.
AMT. Archivo Municipal, Tehuacán, Puebla, Mexico.
BHNM. Biblioteca y Hemeroteca Nacional de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, Mexico City, Mexico.
HMNFR. Hemeroteca Nacional de México, Mexico City, Mexico.

P E R IO D IC A L S

American Wine Press and Mineral Water News, USA

Anales del Instituto Médico, Nacional, Mexico
Boletín de la Asociacion Financiera Internacional, International Edition, English-Spanish,
Mexico
El Estudio, Mexico
El Mundo Ilustrado, Mexico
El Universal, Mexico
Gaceta del Gobierno del Estado de Mexico, Mexico
Gaceta Médica, Mexico
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Gazeta de México, Mexico

Periódico Oficial, Distrito Norte de Baja California, Mexico
Revista Mexicana Periódico Científico y Literario, Mexico
Suplemento al Tomo Sesto del Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística,
Mexico
The Sanitarian, USA
The Texas Health Journal, USA

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 inde x

Aboites, Luis, 118 Avicenna, 22–23, 32

Acapulco, 141 Ávila Camacho, Manuel, 146–49, 150, 151
Agua Caliente, Baja California, 13, 139–40, Áviles, Ramón, 133
140fig., 141 Aztecs: salt tributes to, 142; water and bathing
Agua Caliente, Nuevo León, 125, 126, 130fig., 133 culture of, 17–20, 26–28, 27fig., 32, 52, 59,
Agua Caliente Sulphur Company, 139 86–88
Agua Hedionda, 154
Aguascalientes: industrialization of waters at, bacteriology, 5–6, 91–92, 96
118, 124, 126; opulence of waters of, 76, 78; Baker, Frank Collins, 77
science of mineral waters of, 12, 65, 101–2, 111; Balneario del Riego, 112
spa tourism at, 137, 158 balnearios: opulence of water for, 67–68, 80–83,
Alberca Pane, 80–83, 81fig., 84, 86, 108, 114, 116 86, 112; spa tourism including, 150, 154. See
Alemán, Miguel, 141 also spas
American Public Health Association, 109, 111 Bando of 1793, 42–47
Amor y Escandón, José, 72 Baños Blasio, 80
anthropological research methods, 14 Baños del Amor de Dios, 69
Antomarchi, Francesco, 101–2 Baños del Recreo, 80
Antonio, Lorenzo Francisco, 45 Baños Factor, 80, 81
Arabs, water and bathing cultures of, 3, 4, 5, 11, Baños Osorio, 80
22–23, 52, 86 Barragán, Manuel, 130, 132
Aragón, 103, 105, 106, 114 Barranca del Calderón, 151
Arca Continental Company, 136 Bartolache, Joséph Ignacio, 57
Argüello, Ignacio, 139 bathing: cultural constructs of (See cultural
Aristotle, 4, 22, 25, 26 constructs); definition and meaning
Arriola, Raúl, 124 of, 16–17; dry, 25; foot-baths, 53; future
artesian wells: chemical and biological study of, approaches to, 14; half-body (semicupios),
92–93, 94–96, 116; opulence of water from, 53, 55, 101; heterogeneous waters for (See
69–74, 78, 80, 83–84, 85, 90, 112, 114 heterogeneous waters); hygienic practices
Atotonilco, 94, 101 with (See hygienic practices); immersion
Austria, water and bathing cultures in, 113 (See immersion bathing); industrialized

201
202    Index

promotion of, 13, 121, 125–27, 128–29, 130–35; Cabellero, Andrés, 62, 63
Mediterranean practices, 3, 20–22 (See also Cadbury Schweppes, 135
Greeks; Romans); opulence of water for Calderón de la Barca, Fanny, 66
(See opulence of water); policing waters and Calderón de Vaca, Francis Erskine “Fanny,” 102
(See policing waters and baths); private or Calles, Plutarco Elias, 121, 131, 140–41
domestic, 5, 12, 30, 68, 88, 89–90, 113–15, Campos Mexicanos de Turismo (CMT), 141,
160–61; public bathhouses for (See public 146–49
bathhouses); Roman, 3, 21–22, 25, 86, 113; Cañete, Miguel, 23
science of mineral waters on (See biology Cantú Treviño, Manuel, 127
and water; chemistry of water; science Capone, Al, 139
of mineral waters); showering vs. (See Cárdenas, Lázaro, 124, 141, 146
showering); social constructs of (See social Carlos III, 57
constructs); Spanish colonial era, 3–4, 11, Carson, William, 78
16–17, 20–33, 38; steam (See steam bathing); Case, Alsden, 77
in Tenochtitlán, 20; therapeutic benefits of La Castañeda, 113
(See therapeutic benefits) Cepeda, Celso, 132
Beaumont, Pablo de la Purísima Concepción, Cervantes, Vicente, 101
54–56 Chapala, Lake, 137
biology and water: bacteriology study, 5–6, Chapultepec: chemistry of water at, 93, 116;
91–92, 96; bathing influenced by, 5–6, 12, opulence of water of, 69, 70–71, 72, 86–88,
97–112; bottling mineral waters and, 121–22; 87fig.; policing of, 32, 35, 36; Spanish colonial
cultural constructs and, 4–6, 97–103; disease era, 15, 19
concerns and, 5–6, 91–92, 93, 96–103, 112, 116, chemistry of water: bathing influenced by, 12,
121, 138; drinking mineral waters influenced 97–112; cultural constructs and, 4, 97–103;
by, 4–5, 12, 97–98, 105; groundwater science disease concerns and, 91–92, 93, 97–103, 112,
and, 92–97; hetereogeneity and, 12, 91–117, 116; drinking mineral waters influenced by,
136; hydrotherapy and, 99–101, 103, 105, 4, 12, 97–98, 105; Enlightenment era science
107–9, 112–15; hygienic practices informed of mineral waters using, 12, 53, 58–59, 61,
by, 91–92, 96–103, 112–15; industrialization 64; groundwater science and, 69, 92–97;
reliance on, 13, 121, 122, 136; Liceaga’s work hetereogeneity and, 12, 91–117; hydrotherapy
on, 92, 94, 96, 103, 108–9, 112; overview of, and, 99–101, 103, 105, 107–9, 112–15; hygienic
91–92, 115–17; spa development rationalized practices informed by, 91–92, 96–103, 112–15;
by, 103–12, 104fig., 116–17; therapeutic overview of, 91–92, 115–17; pharmacies
benefits and, 4–6, 12, 91–117, 138 (boticas) replicating, 94, 102; Río de la Loza’s
Blackburn, J.H., 127 work on, 69, 92–93, 94–96, 102, 103, 105, 108;
Blake, Mary, 76, 77–78 spa development rationalized by, 103–12,
Bonavía y Zapata, Bernadeo, 45 104fig., 116–17, 147; therapeutic benefits and,
Botica del Refugio, 94 4, 12, 53, 58–59, 61, 64, 91–117; water testing
bottling mineral waters: chemistry and, with opulent production, 69
4; cultural constructs with, 4, 5, 9; Childe, V. Gordon, 7
industrialized, 13, 118–24, 120fig., 123fig., Cisneros, Bruna, 47
127–31, 132–36, 159–60, 162; Peñón de los Cisneros, María, 47
Baños, 120–21; public water infrastructures climatology, 48, 59, 61, 64, 96–97, 107–8
and, 121, 122; sanitary regulations on, 122–24, clothes washing. See laundry washing
123fig., 134, 135–36; sugar use and, 120, Coca-Cola Company, 13, 120, 124, 134, 135
123–24; Tehuacán, 121–24, 135–36, 159–60; Coley, Noel, 93
therapeutic benefits of, 13, 118–24, 159–60; Coliseo Nuevo, 86
Topo Chico, 127–31, 132–36, 159–60; colonial era. See Spanish colonial era
twenty-first century issues with, 162; Comisión Sobre las Aguas Potables de Mexico, 94
virtuous waters for, 159–60 Compañía de Aguas Gaseosas, 132
Brazil, water culture in, 5 Compañía de Baños Topo Chico, 126, 130, 132,
Brooks, G.F., 127 134, 135
 Index    203

Compañía Embotelladora Topo Chico, 135 de Valle Arizpe, Artemio, 86

Compañía Explotadora de los Manantiales del de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, Felipe, 57
Peñón, 120–21 Díaz, Plácido, 102
Compañía Impulsora de Acapulco, 141 Díaz, Porfirio, 71, 80, 96, 109, 110–12, 114, 128, 138
concessions, water. See mercedes of water Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 15, 16, 26
Coxenechea y Carreaga, Leandro Manuel, 40 Diego, Juan, 105
Craveri, Ernesto, 71, 94–95, 102 dispossession of waters: industrialization and,
Crawford, Cora, 76, 88 118, 124–35, 135–36; spa tourism and, 124–35,
Cruz Roja, 122 138–39, 144–48, 153
Cuauhtémoc, 86 Domenech, Emmanuel, 75
Cuincho, 57–58, 101, 137 Donnavan, Corydon, 75
cultural constructs: cosmovision as, 19–20; drinking mineral waters: bathing and, 1, 2;
cultural ecology perspective, 7; economic bottling for (See bottling mineral waters);
decision-making as, 9; gender segregation cultural practices of, 3, 4–5; future
as (See gender segregation); hot springs and approaches to, 14; heterogeneous waters for,
bathing as, 2–6, 21–22 (See also bathing; hot 8, 12, 97–98, 159; science of mineral waters
springs); hydraulic society as, 7–9; moral on, 4–5, 12, 55, 61, 97–98, 105
(See moral constructs); opulence of water Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, 135, 158
revolutionizing, 73–77, 84–90; policing dry bathing, 25
waters and baths consideration of, 43, 46–47; Dueñas Pacheco, Carlos José, 62
political ecology and, 9, 10; religious (See Dumont, Joséph, 60–61
religious traditions); science of mineral Durand-Fardel, Maxime, 103
waters and, 4–6, 12, 97–103, 105–7; Spanish Durie, Alistair, 98–99
colonial era influence on, 11 (See also Spanish
colonial era); spa tourism influenced by, 5, Elton, James, 78–79
6, 8; virtuous waters, 161–62. See also social Enlightenment era: policing waters and baths in,
constructs 11–12, 34–49, 50, 122–24, 161, 167n32; science
Cumplido, Ignacio, 74, 85 of mineral waters in, 12, 50–66
Enríquez, Fadrique, 24
de Cal, Antonio, 59 Escobar, José Anselmo, 47
de Cárdenas, Juan, 27, 54 La Estación, 103, 105, 109
de Cuéllar, José, 82, 82fig.., 109 Europe, water and bathing cultures in, 3–4,
de Deza, Hernando, 60 5–6, 8–9, 25, 66, 83, 101–2, 103, 105, 107, 113,
de Fonserrada, Joséph Bernardo, 57 119–20. See also specific countries
de Galve, Conde, 31
de Gogochea, Leandro Manuel, 40 Fabela, Isidro, 150, 151
de Gortari Rabiela, 34 Fabian, Sebastian, 40
de Juanclara, Conde, 40 Farmacopea Mexicana, 94, 102
De la Cal y Bracho, Antonio, 101 Feast Day of Saint John the Baptist, 84–85
Delacroix, Emile, 107 Fernández, Miguel, 57
de la Lima, Ambrosio, 31 Fleury, Louis, 100, 100fig., 113
de Landa, Diego, 26, 28 Florentine Codex, 26, 27fig.
demand management systems, 9, 162 Flores Magón, Enrique, 146, 147, 148
de Miravalle, Condesa, 36 Florez, Manuel Antonio, 37
de Monclova, Conde, 31 Forbes, Alexander, 74–76
de Oliver, Joséph, 31 fountains. See public fountains
de Ordaz, Diego, 60 France, water and bathing cultures in, 3, 4, 5, 25,
de Revillagigedo, Conde, 11, 31, 37, 40, 42–43 83, 96, 103, 107
Desierto de los Leones, 93
de Tapia, Beatriz, 28 Galen, 4, 22, 25, 32
de Tapia, Fernando, 28 García Cubas, Antonio, 77, 84, 87–88, 112
de Torres, Nicolás, 61 Garci-Crespo, José María, 141
204    Index

Garci-Crespo company, 135 Hoffman, David, 139

Garza, J.T., 132, 134 Hoffman, Friedrich, 61
Gayol, Roberto, 109, 115 homogeneous waters: industrialized quality
Gayuca, Regino, 102 standards, 13; science of mineral waters on,
Gazeta de México, 57, 59, 62, 63 56, 91–92, 136; sustainable relationships with,
Geiger, John Lewis, 75 162; twenty-first century views of, 160, 162;
gender segregation: policing waters and baths water studies view of, 6–9
for, 12, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44–47, 49; science of Hospital del Amor de Dios, 41
mineral waters on, 55; social constructs and, Hospital de San Lucas, 99
75, 76–77, 81–82; Spanish colonial era, 23 Hospital Real de los Naturales, 41, 56, 62
Germany, water and bathing cultures in, 107, Hotel-Baths of Ixtapan de la Sal, 144, 145,
113, 119 146–47, 150
Gilliam, Albert, 76, 98 Hotel Casa Blanca, 144, 148
Gillpatrick, Wallace, 78 Hotel Casino de la Selva, 141
Glass, E.R., 127 Hotel Garci-Crespo, 141, 158
Gómez, Filiberto, 144 Hotel Ixtapan, 157, 161
Gómez, Marte R., 146, 148–49 Hotel Marmól, 127
González, María Gertrudis, 45 Hotel Peñafiel, 141
González Hidalgo, Lucas, 125 Hotel Valles, 146
González Urueña, Juan Manuel, 99 hot springs: bathing in (See bathing); cultural
Graf, Santiago, 142, 144 constructs with, 2–6, 21–22; expeditions to
Greeks, water and bathing cultures of, 3, 4, 22, study, 51, 54–59, 65, 101; hygienic practices
25, 86 with (See hygienic practices); industrialized
groundwater: chemical and biological balance ownership of, 13, 118–36, 158, 159–60, 162;
in, 69, 92–97; conflicts and legal disputes maps of, xivmap, 128–29, 132–33; science of
over, 71–72; cultural constructs of, 3; mineral waters on, 4–6, 12, 50–66, 98, 99,
depletion of, 13, 71–73, 90; irrigation via, 101–12; Spanish colonial era, 11, 16–17, 22–28;
18, 70, 73, 88; opulence of (See opulence of spa tourism at (See spa tourism); therapeutic
water) benefits of (See therapeutic benefits). See also
Gutiérrez del Mazo, Ramón, 42 specific hot springs
humoralism, 31, 59, 64
Hale, Edward and Susan, 79, 80 hydraulic infrastructures. See public water
Hamlin, Christopher, 6 infrastructures
hammam, Spanish colonial era, 11 hydraulic opulence. See opulence of water
El Hammam, 86 hydraulic society, 7–9
Hardy, Robert, 98 hydrology, 112, 118, 128–29, 131, 135, 136
El Harem, 80, 86 hydropathy movement, 92, 98–99, 113
Haven, Gilbert, 72, 73 hydrotherapy, 99–101, 103, 105, 107–9, 112–15, 147,
health benefits. See therapeutic benefits 156, 157fig.
Hellión, Emilio, 127 hygienic practices: bathing as (See bathing);
Herrera, Francisco, 71 biology and chemistry informing, 91–92,
heterogeneous waters: industrialized bottling 96–103, 112–15; bottling industry requirements
of, 13, 118–24, 136, 159–60, 162; science for, 122–24, 134, 135–36; cultural constructs
of mineral waters on, 12, 56, 91–117, of, 4; opulence of water for, 75, 77–78, 82–83,
136; sustainable relationships with, 162; 85, 88; policing consideration of, 50; religious
therapeutic benefits of, 12, 56, 91–117; twenty- influences on, 23–24; showering as, 112–15
first century views of, 160–62; virtues of, (See also showering); Spanish colonial era,
156–57, 159–60 (See also virtuous waters); 23–24, 26, 28–29, 33; in Tenochtitlán, 20. See
water studies view of, 6–9 also sanitary regulations
Hierve el Agua, 28
Hinojosa, Augusto, 151 Iglehart, Fanny, 79, 85
Hippocrates, 4, 32, 48, 61, 93 Ildefonso brothers, 92–93
 Index    205

immersion bathing: cultural and social practices 75, 76, 77, 83; policing of, 36, 37, 39, 42, 44, 47,
of, 3, 4, 24; definition of bathing including, 167n32; science of mineral waters on, 55
16–17; Mesoamerican practices, 25–28, 27fig., Lavoisier, Antoine, 6, 56, 57, 59
29; opulence of water for, 67–68, 73, 83, 85, Lefort, Jules, 103
89; policing of, 36, 38, 44, 46, 49; showering Liceaga, Eduardo: bathhouse development by,
vs., 112–15 (See also showering); Spanish 92, 103, 109–11, 138; as Díaz’s physician and
colonial era, 24, 25–28, 27fig., 29, 32, 33; advisor, 80, 96, 111, 138; scientific work of, 92,
steam bathing vs., 28–29, 32, 67; virtuous 94, 96, 103, 108–9, 112, 113–14, 121
water for, 160. See also swimming licensing, 40, 42, 43–44. See also mercedes of
industrialization of waters: bottling industry water
and, 13, 118–24, 120fig., 123fig., 127–31, 132–35, Linnaeus, 57
159–60, 162; dispossession of waters and, Linton, Jamie, 6, 56
118, 124–35, 135–36; hydrology and, 118, Lobato, José, 103, 105–7, 108, 112, 119, 120
128–29, 131, 135, 136; legal conflicts over, 128; López, María Antonia, 45
mapping and, 128–29, 132–33; overview of, López de Gómara, Francisco, 17
13, 118–19, 135–36; sanitary regulations on, Lorenzana, Francisco Antonio, 54
122–24, 123fig., 134, 136; state centralized Luciano, Lucky, 139
control facilitating, 13, 118–19, 123–24, 129–35; Lyon, George, 75
Tehuacán, 13, 118, 121–24, 135–36, 137, 159–60;
Topo Chico, 118, 124–36, 125fig., 137, 158, Macías-González, Victor, 113
159–60 Maestro de Obras, 36
infrastructures. See public water infrastructures Malo, Ramón, 102
inhalation practices, 5, 106fig., 119 Manero, José María, 65–66
intendancies, system of, 56 Marx, Karl, 118
irrigation communities: groundwater for, 18, 70, Masson, Ernesto, 101, 102
73, 88; hydraulic society and, 7–8; science McCarty, Joséph, 78
of mineral waters on, 55; state centralized Mendieta, Gerónimo de, 26
control of water to, 131–33, 144; Tenochtitlán Mendoza, Gumersindo, 103
and, 18, 19 mercedes of water: opulence of water and
Italy, water and bathing cultures in, 3, 25 availability of, 69, 72, 82, 88; policing
Ixtapan de la Sal: Hotel-Baths of Ixtapan de la and water and baths for, 35, 36, 39, 40;
Sal, 144, 145, 146–47, 150; Hotel Ixtapan, 157, spa tourism and, 145–46, 148–53; state
161; hydrotherapy at, 147, 156, 157fig.; Ixtapan centralized control of, 134, 145–46
Aquatic Park, 155, 157; Ixtapan Spa, 157; Mexico: bathing in (See bathing); cultural
municipal bathhouses, 142, 152fig., 153, constructs in (See cultural constructs);
155–56, 156fig., 157fig., 160, 161; Nueva hot springs in (See hot springs); Mexican-
Ixtapan, 150–51, 151fig., 153; science of American War, 137; Mexican Revolution in,
mineral waters of, 52; Spanish colonial era, 118, 129–30; social constructs in (See social
28; spa tourism at, 13, 138–39, 141–54, 143fig., constructs); Spanish colonial era in (See
155–62; virtuous waters of, 155–62 Spanish colonial era); War of Independence
in, 65; waters in (See waters)
Jackson, Julia, 76 Mexico City: drainage system in, 17–18, 32, 35,
Japan, water and bathing cultures in, 5, 6 71, 109; opulence of water for, 12, 67–90,
Jennings, Eric, 96, 138 171–72n7; policing waters and baths in, 11–12,
Jews, water and bathing cultures of, 11, 23, 24 34–49; public water infrastructures in, 17–18;
Jorrín, Pedro, 102 Tenochtitlán as historic center of, 16, 17–20,
Jorullo, 56–57 21, 32, 69, 86; water scarcity in, 11, 34, 36
Michoacán, 11, 12, 56–58
Ladrón de Guevara, Baltasar, 34 Military Hospital, 99
Ladrón de Guevara, Diego, 34–35, 38, 43 mineral waters: bathing in (See bathing);
laundry washing (lavanderos): nudity during, 44, bottling of (See bottling mineral waters);
47, 76, 77, 83, 167n32; opulence of water for, cultural constructs associated with (See
206    Index

cultural constructs); drinking of (See Nueva Farmacopea Mexicana, 94, 102

drinking mineral waters); future approaches Nueva Ixtapan, 150–51, 151fig., 153
to, 13–14, 160–62; heterogeneity of (See
heterogeneous waters); hot springs of (See Oaxtepec, 28, 153–54
hot springs); hygienic practices with (See Oball, Miguel, 40
hygienic practices); industrialization of Ober, Frederick, 78
(See industrialization of waters); policing of Ocampo, Gabriel de, 63
(See policing waters and baths); science of Ojo Caliente, Nuevo León, 125, 126, 133
(See biology and water; chemistry of water; Ojocaliente, San Luis Potosí, 101
science of mineral waters); Spanish colonial opulence of water: aquifer depletion with, 71–73,
era (See Spanish colonial era); spa tourism 90; artesian wells providing, 69–74, 78, 80,
with (See spa tourism); therapeutic benefits 83–84, 85, 90, 112, 114; balnearios growth
of (See therapeutic benefits); virtuous (See with, 67–68, 80–83, 86, 112; Chapultepec’s,
virtuous waters) 69, 70–71, 72, 86–88, 87fig.; conflicts and
Mintz, Sidney, 89 legal disputes over, 71–72; disease concerns
misting apparatus, 106fig., 119 with, 71; hygienic practices and, 75, 77–78,
Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, 19 82–83, 85, 88; mercedes of water with, 69,
Molina, José, 44–45, 47 72, 82, 88; overview of, 12, 67–68, 88–90;
Molteni, D. Augustin, 92 political ecology of, 68; private bathrooms
Monsanto, 123 with, 88, 89–90; public bathhouse popularity
Montt family, 122 with, 12, 67–69, 71, 73–90, 112, 114; public
moral constructs: policing waters and baths for, fountains benefiting from, 70, 71, 84, 89fig.;
11–12, 42, 43, 46–47, 49; science of mineral public water infrastructures supplying, 12,
waters on, 55, 58, 60; Spanish colonial era, 67–74, 78, 80, 83–84, 85, 90, 94–95, 112, 114;
23–24, 29–30. See also religious traditions rates of production, 171–72n7; religious
Morales, Samuel, 113 festivals benefiting from, 84–85; social
mud pools, 156, 160 constructs and, 68, 70–71, 76–78, 80–83, 85–
Mundet, Arturo, 124 86, 88–90; water culture revolutionized with,
Murguía, Manuel, 69 73–77, 84–90; Xacopinca’s, 68–69, 71, 94
Musset, Alain, 32 Ordenanza of 1786, 56
Ortiz de Zarate, Ignacio, 92–93
National Academy of Medicine, 92, 96, 102, Ortiz Rubio, Pascual, 140, 141, 144, 146–47,
107–8, 109 148–49, 150
National Bacteriological Institute, 92 Ossian Henry, Etienne, 103
National General Hospital, 92, 96, 108–9, 113
National Health Council, 92, 94, 96, 102, 109, 114 Pacheco, Carlos, 108, 114
National Institute of Medicine (NIM), 108 Páez, Leónides, 130
nationalized waters. See state centralized control Palerm, Angel, 7
of waters Pane, Sebastián, 70–71, 79–80, 92, 94, 95
National Public Health Department Pasteur, Louis, 4, 95, 97, 116
(Departamento de Salubridad Pública), Paterson, Guillermo, 83
113–15, 121–24, 130–31, 134, 135 Patiño, Manuel, 72
National School of Medicine, 92, 94, 96, 100, Pauer, L., 94
108, 113 Pedro, Miguel, 40
National Water Archives, 154 Peñafiel, Antonio, 71, 73, 86, 96–97, 103
New Water Culture (Nueva Cultura del Agua) Peñafiel company, 135, 159–60
movement, 9 Peñón de los Baños: biological and chemical
Nezahualcóyotl, 19, 21 study of, 92, 94, 102–3, 107, 109; bottling
Nezahualcóyotl’s Baths, 87 mineral waters at, 120–21; modern day,
Nogueras, José, 99 1–2, 2fig., 158–59; policing of, 41; sanitary
Nosari, José, 142 regulations for, 114; science of mineral waters
nudity. See sexuality and nudity and rebuilding of, 12, 59–64, 65, 101, 102–3,
 Index    207

107, 109–11, 110fig., 111fig.; Spanish colonial de los Baños as (See Peñón de los Baños);
era, 11, 28; spa tourism at, 62–64, 137 placeres in, 2, 2fig., 11, 39–40, 44, 46, 67,
Peredo, Victor, 152 68, 103, 114, 158, 161; policing of, 11–12, 36,
Pérez Rívas, Carlos, 93 37, 38–47, 49; sanitary regulations for, 114;
Peter of Eboli, 3 science of mineral waters and, 5–6, 12,
Pevedilla, Manuel, 42 62–64, 65–66, 103–17, 147; showers in, 100,
pharmacies (boticas), 94, 102, 122 103, 112–13, 114–15; Spanish colonial era,
placeres, 2, 2fig., 11, 39–40, 44, 46, 67, 68, 103, 114, 11, 23–25, 29, 33; spa tourism and (See spa
158, 161 tourism); in Tenochtitlán, 20. See also
Pliny the Elder, 4, 25, 32 specific bathhouses
Pocito, 105, 106, 107, 158, 159fig. public fountains: opulence of water for, 70, 71,
policing waters and baths: Bando of 1793 for, 84, 89fig.; policing of, 12, 35–36, 37–38, 44, 47;
42–47; bottling mineral waters subject Spanish colonial era, 20
to, 122–24, 123fig.; cultural considerations public water infrastructures: artesian wells as
with, 43, 46–47; definition of police for, 35, (See artesian wells); bottling industry and,
48; Enlightenment era, 11–12, 34–49, 50, 121, 122; demand management systems
122–24, 161, 167n32; environment for, 35–38; with, 9, 162; development of, 6, 11 (See also
gender segregation, 12, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44–47, opulence of water); homogeneity of water
49; laundry washing, 36, 37, 39, 42, 44, 47, in, 7, 8–9; irrigation communities using, 7–8,
167n32; licensing and, 40, 42, 43–44; Maestro 18, 70, 73; opulence of water from, 12, 67–74,
de Obras’s report informing, 36; mercedes of 78, 80, 83–84, 85, 90, 94–95, 112, 114; policing
water and, 35, 36, 39, 40; overview of, 11–12, waters and baths and, 35, 36–38, 43, 48–49,
34–35, 48–49, 50; public bathhouses, 11–12, 50; sanitary regulations for, 124; Spanish
36, 37, 38–47, 49; public fountains, 12, 35–36, colonial era, 16, 32; spa tourism reliance on,
37–38, 44, 47; public water infrastructures 150–51; sustainable consumption from, 162;
and, 35, 36–38, 43, 48–49, 50; sexuality and in Tenochtitlán, 18–19, 20, 32, 69
nudity concerns, 36, 41–42, 43, 44, 47, 49,
161, 167n32; social class and constructs with, railroads: bottled water shipped by, 122, 135;
11–12, 35, 41–42, 43–49, 50; swimming, 42; opulence of water attracting visitors by, 76,
temazcales, 36, 38, 39–41, 42–47, 49, 161; 80–81; spa tourists transported by, 111, 118,
therapeutic and health considerations with, 126–27, 137
37, 38–39, 40–41, 43, 46, 48–49, 50; waste Ramírez, Onofre, 47
removal, 12, 38, 44, 47; water scarcity and, 36, Randle, Jules A., 126–27
37–38; water sellers (aguadores), 35, 37, 39 Real Protomedicato, 31, 61
political ecology: cultural constructs and, Regulations for Public Baths, 114
9, 10; of groundwater opulence, 68; new religious traditions: baths and hot springs in,
materialism and, 10; ontology of waters 3, 11, 21–22, 29–31, 84–85, 105, 107, 158; holy
and, 10; spa tourism and, 139–41; state water, 3, 158; science of mineral waters and,
centralization and, 129–31 12, 54, 60–61, 63, 64, 99, 105, 107; Spanish
Portes Gil, Emilio, 122 colonial era, 3, 11, 22, 23–24, 29–31. See also
Presidential Accord, 147–50, 151 moral constructs
Presidential Resolution of 1926, 131 research methods, 14
Priessnitz, Vincent, 98, 113 Reyes, Bernardo, 126
public bathhouses: cultural and social constructs Reynoso, José, 144–46, 147, 150
of, 3–4, 5–6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 29, 41–42, 43–47, Riaño, Juan Antonio de, 56, 57
49, 62–64, 65–66, 68, 76, 105–7, 140–41, El Riego, 121, 122, 158
161; electro-medical, 113; industrialized Río de la Loza, Leopoldo, 69, 71–72, 92–93,
ownership of, 13, 121, 125–27, 128–29, 130–35; 94–96, 102, 103, 105, 108
laundry washing in, 36, 39, 42, 44; licensing Rivera Cambas, Manuel, 81, 84, 85
of, 40, 43–44; opulence of water and Rodríguez, Abelardo L., 139–41
popularity of, 12, 67–69, 71, 73–90, 112, 114; Rodríguez, Carlos, 144, 148–49, 151–53
ownership and operation of, 39–40; Peñón Rodríguez Galeana, 139
208    Index

Romans: public water infrastructures of, 7; water constructs influencing, 51, 55–56, 62–63,
and bathing culture of, 3, 21–22, 25, 86, 113 64–66, 101, 105–7, 110–11; spa tourism ties to,
Romero Rubio, Manuel, 109, 111, 138 62–64, 65–66, 147; therapeutic and health
Rosas, Juventino, 81 benefits considered in, 4–6, 12, 50–66, 91–117,
Ross, Paul, 96 138; virtues of waters in, 51–53, 59, 63, 93. See
Royal Academy of San Carlos, 57 also biology and water; chemistry of water
Royal Botanical Garden and Expedition, 57, 59, Semeleder, Friedrich, 107, 109
63, 101 sexuality and nudity: bathing and, 3, 22, 23, 24,
Royal Mining School, 57 25, 26, 29–31, 36, 41–42, 43, 47, 49, 75–77;
Royal Protomedicato, 31, 61 laundry washing and, 44, 47, 76, 77, 83,
Ruiz Somavilla, María José, 23, 24 167n32; policing waters and baths for, 36,
Ruxton, George, 75 41–42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 161, 167n32; private
bathing to avoid, 113–14, 161; science of
La Saca, 125, 128, 130, 133 mineral waters on, 55, 58; social constructs
Sáez de Heredia, Emeterio, 99 of, 76–77, 161; Spanish colonial era, 23, 24, 25,
salt, 19, 28, 52, 58, 142 26, 29–31
Salto del Agua, 70–71 showering: cultural constructs of, 4, 5; definition
San Bartolomé Agua Caliente, 28, 54–56, 65, of bathing including, 17; Fleury design of,
101, 137 100, 100fig.; opulence of water for, 67, 80, 81,
Sánchez, Bartolomé, 23 84, 86, 88–90; private or domestic, 1, 88, 90,
San Felipe Baths, 113 115, 117; science of mineral waters and use
sanitary regulations: on bottling mineral waters, of, 55, 92, 98, 100, 103, 109, 112–15, 116–17;
122–24, 123fig., 134, 135–36; Sanitary Code as, Spanish colonial era, 25
96, 108, 114, 122–24; Sanitary Engineering Six Flags Company, 154
and Potable Water regulations as, 114, 115. See Slayden, Emma, 126, 127
also hygienic practices Smith, Francis, 76, 77
Sanitation Board, 94 Snow, John T., 5, 95
San Juan Teotihuacan, 31 social constructs: bathing and hot springs
San Lorenzo Mineral Water Company, 122 use as, 3–6, 12, 21, 29–30, 41–42, 43–49,
San Román, Arturo, 150–52, 153, 155 62–63, 68, 76, 105–7, 161; hydraulic society
San Román, Atilano, 150 as, 7–9; opulence of water and, 68, 70–71,
Santa Cecilia, 57 76–78, 80–83, 85–86, 88–90; policing water
Santa Fe, 35, 36, 38, 69, 70, 93, 116 and baths and, 11–12, 35, 41–42, 43–49,
Santa Rosalia, 126 50; political ecology and, 9, 10; science of
Schryver, A.C., 126 mineral waters influenced by, 51, 55–56,
science of mineral waters: chemical analysis 62–63, 64–66, 101, 105–7, 110–11; Spanish
of water in, 12, 53, 58–59, 61, 64 (See also colonial era influence on, 11 (See also Spanish
chemistry of water); cultural constructs colonial era); spa tourism influenced by, 5, 6,
and, 4–6, 12, 97–103, 105–7; disease spread 8, 13, 62–64, 65–66, 140–41, 161; swimming
and, 5–6, 91–92, 93, 96–103, 112, 116, 121, 138; and, 42; virtuous waters, 161. See also cultural
Enlightenment era, 12, 50–66; exotic and constructs
exceptional search in, 51, 54; expeditions Sosa, Secundino, 108, 112
informing, 51, 54–59, 65, 101; Gazeta de Spain: bathing practices in, 21–25; National
México reporting, 57, 59, 62, 63; heterogeneity Hydraulic Plan in, 9; New Water Culture
vs. homogeneity in, 12, 56, 91–117, 136; movement in, 9; water culture in, 3–4, 6, 9,
industrialization reliance on, 13, 121, 122, 11, 22 (See also Spanish colonial era)
136; intendancies to collect information for, Spanish colonial era: bathing by immersion in,
56; overview of, 12, 50–51, 64–66; Peñón de 24, 25–28, 27fig., 29, 32, 33; eclipse of bathing
los Baños rebuilding and, 12, 59–64, 65, 101, in, 3–4, 22–25; Mediterranean bathing
102–3, 107, 109–11, 110fig., 111fig.; religious practices in, 20–22; overview of, 11, 15–17,
influences on, 12, 54, 60–61, 63, 64, 99, 105, 32–33; religious influences on, 3, 11, 22, 23–24,
107; scientific institutions to study, 57; social 29–31; science of mineral waters in (See
 Index    209

science of mineral waters); sexuality and licenses for swimming pools, 42; opulence of
nudity views in, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29–31; steam water for, 12, 67–68, 72–73, 75, 80, 85, 87–88;
bathing and temazcal in, 11, 17, 23, 25, 28–31, policing of, 42; Spanish colonial era, 24, 26;
30fig., 32–33, 38; Tenochtitlán and, 16, 17–20, spa tourism including, 142, 154; therapeutic
21, 32; War of Independence ending, 65 benefits of, 42
spas: biological and chemical rationale for
development of, 103–12, 104fig., 116–17, Tehuacán: industrialization of waters of, 13,
147; industrialization and dispossession of, 118, 121–24, 135–36, 137, 159–60; science
124–35; opulence of water for, 67–68, 80–83, of mineral waters of, 12, 59, 101, 102, 112;
86, 112; tourism based on (See spa tourism) Spanish colonial era, 28; spa tourism at,
spa tourism: Agua Caliente, 13, 139–40, 140fig., 140–41, 158
141; capital for development of, 138–39, temazcales: cultural and social practices of, 11,
148–50, 161; conflict and compromise over, 29–31; opulence of water and decline of, 67;
138–39, 141, 144–53; cultural and social policing of baths and, 36, 38, 39–41, 42–47,
constructs influencing, 5, 6, 8, 13, 62–64, 49, 161; public bathhouses including, 39–41,
65–66, 140–41, 161; dispossession of waters 42–47, 49; science of mineral waters on, 53;
and, 124–35, 138–39, 144–48, 153; gambling Spanish colonial era, 11, 17, 28–31, 30fig.,
and, 141; hydrotherapy in, 147, 156, 157fig.; 32–33, 38; sweatlodges for, 29; in Tenochtitlán,
industrialization and, 124–35; Ixtapan de 20; therapeutic benefits of, 29, 31, 41, 49
la Sal, 13, 138–39, 141–54, 143fig., 155–62; Tenochtitlán, 16, 17–20, 21, 32, 69, 86
mercedes of water for, 145–46, 148–53; tequisquite, 52, 58
municipal bathhouses and, 142, 152fig., 153, Teteo Innan, 29
155–56, 156fig., 157fig., 160, 161; Oaxtepec, Tezcatlipoca, 29
153–54; overview of, 13, 137–39, 153–54; public therapeutic benefits: bottling mineral waters
water infrastructure importance to, 150–51; for, 13, 118–24, 159–60; cultural practices
science of mineral waters and development and, 3–6, 10; disease concerns vs., 5–6, 25,
of, 62–64, 65–66, 147; sonorenses and, 139–41; 48, 71, 91–92, 93, 96–103, 112, 116, 121, 138; of
state centralized control of water affecting, hydrotherapy, 99–101, 103, 105, 107–9, 112–15,
144–46, 147; Tehuacán, 140–41, 158; virtuous 147, 156; policing water and baths for, 37,
waters for, 155–62 38–39, 40–41, 43, 46, 48–49, 50; science of
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation, 9 mineral waters and, 4–6, 12, 50–66, 91–117,
state centralized control of waters: 138 (See also biology and water; chemistry
industrialization facilitated by, 13, 118–19, of water); Spanish colonial era views of, 11,
123–24, 129–35; spa tourism affected by, 22–25, 29, 31, 38; spas promoting, 103–12,
144–46, 147 147–48, 155; spa tourism in relation to, 138,
steam bathing: cultural and social practices of, 147–48, 155–62; virtuous waters providing,
3, 4, 5, 11, 29–31; hammam as, 11; immersion 10, 51–53, 93, 155–62
bathing vs., 28–29, 32, 67; opulence of water Tlaloc, 19–20
and decline of, 67; policing of baths and, 36, Tlatelolco, 68–69
38, 39–41, 42–47, 49, 161; public bathhouses Tocitzin, 29
including, 39–41, 42–47, 49; science of Topo Chico: industrialization of waters of, 118,
mineral waters on, 53; Spanish colonial 124–36, 125fig., 137, 158, 159–60; science of
era, 11, 17, 23, 25, 28–31, 30fig., 32–33, 38; mineral waters of, 12, 65, 101, 111
sweatlodges for, 29; temazcales for, 11, 17, 20, Toro, Ignacio, 83
28–31, 30fig., 32–33, 36, 38, 39–41, 42–47, 49, Torres, Antonio, 83
53, 67, 161; in Tenochtitlán, 20; therapeutic Treviño, Pedro, 127, 130
benefits of, 5, 29, 31, 41, 49 Turkish baths, 86, 113
Steward, Julian, 7
Sullivan, Margaret, 76, 77–78 United Kingdom, water and bathing cultures
sweatlodges, 29 in, 5, 83
swimming: bathing relationship to, 17; cultural United States: industrialization of waters, 123,
and social constructs and popularity of, 5, 42; 126–27; Mexican-American War with, 137;
210    Index

public water infrastructures in, 9, 68; spa constructs associated with (See cultural
tourism from, 125–27, 137, 139, 141, 146; water constructs); drinking of (See drinking
and bathing cultures in, 7, 8–9, 66, 76, 113, mineral waters); future approaches to, 13–14,
125–27 160–62; groundwater (See groundwater);
El Universal, 124 heterogeneity of (See heterogeneous waters);
Urbaño, Alonso, 60 homogeneity of (See homogeneous waters);
hot springs of (See hot springs); hygienic
Valley of Mexico, 12, 16, 17–20, 28, 32, 35, 52, practices with (See hygienic practices);
69–70, 92, 95, 97, 138. See also Mexico City industrialization of (See industrialization
Vega, Santiago, 69 of waters); infrastructures for access to (See
Velásquez, José Guadalupe, 69 public water infrastructures); mineral (See
Venegas, Juan Manuel, 53 mineral waters); opulence of (See opulence
Vergara, José, 144, 145–46, 153 of water); policing of (See policing waters
Viera, Juan de, 63 and baths); political ecology of (See political
Villa de Guadalupe, 92, 103, 104fig., 105, 106, 109, ecology); scarcity of, 9, 11, 34, 36, 37–38, 48,
158, 159fig. 67, 68, 69, 71–73; science of (See biology
Villaroel, Hipólito, 34, 35 and water; chemistry of water; science of
Villaseñor y Sánchez, Antonio, 60 mineral waters); Spanish colonial era (See
Virgin de Guadalupe, 105, 158 Spanish colonial era); spa tourism with
virtuous waters: bathing in, 156, 160; bottling (See spa tourism); state centralized control
of, 159–60; cultural constructs of, 161–62; of (See state centralized control of waters);
hydrotherapy with, 156; ontology of concept, sustainable relationships with, 161–62;
10; overview of, 13–14; science of mineral therapeutic benefits of (See therapeutic
waters on, 51–53, 59, 63, 93; social constructs benefits); virtuous (See virtuous waters)
of, 161; spa tourism and, 155–62; sustainable water sellers (aguadores): opulence of water for,
relationships with, 161–62; therapeutic 80; policing waters and, 35, 37, 39
benefits of, 10, 51–53, 93, 155–62; twenty-first Wiltse, Jeff, 68
century views of, 160–62. See also mineral Wittfogel, Karl, 7
waters; waters World Bank, 9

waste removal: policing of, 12, 38, 44, 47; Xacopinca, 68–69, 71, 94
Sanitary Code on, 114; in Tenochtitlán, 20 Xochilmilco, 73, 88, 90, 93, 114
waters: bathing in (See bathing); bottling of Xochitepec, 59, 101
(See bottling mineral waters); concessions
for (See mercedes of water); cultural Zurutuza, Anselmo, 102
ANTHROPOLOGY | LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES | ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Virtuous Waters is the first study of mineral waters and bathing in Mexico. It traces the
evolving ideas about these waters, from European contact to the present, in order to
shed new light on human-environment relations in the modern world. Our relation to
water is among the most urgent of global issues, as increasing scarcity and pollution
threaten to lead to food shortages, deteriorating public health, and the collapse of
aquatic ecosystems.

Drawing on ideas from political ecology, the author brings together an analysis of
the shifts in the concept of water and a material history of environments, infrastruc-
tures, and bathing. The book analyzes a range of issues concerning complex “water
cultures” that have formed around Mexican groundwaters over time and suggests that
this understanding might also help us comprehend and confront the water crisis that
is coming to a head in the twenty-first century.

“Reminds us that, within wider homogenizing discourses, there are multiple unique
waters, whose particular ‘virtues’ are central in defining how people have imagined,
understood, and interacted with them over time.” VERONICA STRANG, author of Gar-
dening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water

“Plunges readers into seldom explored depths of the cultural world of water in central
Mexico, providing a refreshing approach that goes beyond infrastructure to immerse
readers in in routine practices of bathing, washing, and drinking water and their links
to colonialism, public health, sexuality, tourism, and neoliberalism.” JOHN SOLURI,
author of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in
Honduras and the United States

CASEY WALSH is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. He is

the author of Building the Borderlands: A Transnational History of Irrigated Cotton
along the Mexico-Texas Border.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

www.ucpress.edu | www.luminosoa.org
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of
California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs.
Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Cover illustration: Rick Stich. “Blue Swimmer/Yellow Reflection.” 70 X 52.

Acrylic on Tyvek on Panel.