La Jornada: They reflect on the relationship between CDMX and water

Merry MacMasters

La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, July 16, 2026, p. 8

the book AMATL, archive, memory and water offers a vision of the vital liquid through plans, documents and photographs from the Historical Archive of Mexico City (AHCM). It is a joint work of the AHCM, a dependency of the local Ministry of Culture, Agua Capital-Water Fund of Mexico City and the Water Advisory Council, with the support of the Helvex Group. The work proposes an exploration of unpublished documents: archives, council proceedings, photographs, maps and cartography that show the historical memory of the decisions that founded the hydraulic development of the country’s capital.

Its circulation is 500 thousand copies and the digital edition is available to the public who can download it for free on the platform www.aguas.org.mx and on the social networks of the Water Advisory Council and the AHCM. Soon, a shorter bilingual version will be made in terms of images and texts, to take to World Water Week, which will take place in Stockholm from August 24 to 28.

The AHCM protects documents from the country’s capital from 1524, including those referring to water. For the purposes of the edition, “we wanted to put all this documentation in dialogue with expert voices – a total of 21 – from a very broad group of people who have worked on the issue of water from different perspectives, such as academic research, public administration and conflict management,” said Camilo Vicente Ovalle, director of the archive.

However, in AMATL the work of researchers and officials resulting from a reflection on the AHCM documents will not be seen, because “it is not intended that way.” In fact, it is the first time that the authors of the texts who attended the presentation “see these documents as a whole because the idea was to put these two voices in dialogue: that of the archive and that of the experts, in order to produce other types of reflections regarding the subject of water,” said Camilo Vicente Ovalle.

The book is divided into six chapters: The water mirror: history of water in the Basin of Mexico; Water has memory: Water and the native peoples of Mexico City; Rivers of ink: Infrastructure in plans and projects; When the river sounds: The fight for water; Imaginary: Water projects on paper, and Water you shouldn’t drink, let it run: Future perspectives.

With these, “we try to provide a more or less global perspective regarding how the city has been linked, in tension, in problems, with water. How we have tried in some moments to govern water and how it has governed us in others. To what extent the liquid has been experienced as a problem, but also as a solution,” said the historian.

Jorge Fuentes Martínez, project director of the Water Advisory Council, indicated that the book emerged from a talk with Vicente Ovalle: “we need people to understand that we are in a water crisis. They must also understand what has been done in the past, what is currently being done and where the city should go.”

For Eduardo Vázquez Herrera, another of the authors, “we must learn in one way or another to work with and for water because we will never beat it. That is why I say that the city lives and dies with the liquid. We are already experiencing the problem and it requires an informed vision, collective action and a sum of efforts.”

The relationship between water and Mexico City is, above all, a cultural one and only from that broad perspective is it possible to understand its historical density and its relevance for the present, said Ana Francis López Bayghen, Secretary of Culture of Mexico City, who commissioned those responsible for the edition to make dissemination materials for Capital 21 and the agency’s social networks in which the content of the book is narrated.