The ability of the nobility to shore up its position in the face of demographic decline reached its limits in the seventeenth century. Xochimilco’s ongoing financial troubles, which had their twin origins in population loss and the dislocations brought by climate extremes of the Little Ice Age, further destabilized relations across class lines, as did the criminality of a ruling class that had become estranged from the old collective bonds of the community.examines labor drafts and town finances and presents a microhistory of crime and political violence to explain political change. The upheavals were part of a wider, global crisis of the seventeenth century. With the passing of the old dynastic rulers, an alternative basis for authority came into being. By the century’s end, a new cohort of officeholders came to dominate local government whose authority came to rest on good stewardship of the city’s finances and resources. Lineage and esteemed ancestry ceased to be key factors in local politics as non-native peoples began to assume positions of power at a time increasing ethnic and racial complexity.

The book concludes by examining striking cultural continuities as expressed in language. The final chapter reveals how Nahuatl documentary traditions retained much of their vitality and importance. The sources themselves underwent changes, in orthography and content, that amounted to departures from earlier forms of written expression. These changes reflected the autonomous local traditions of documentary production in Native communities. At the same time, though, the sources also exhibited a remarkable degree of resilience and stability in its vocabulary and grammatical structures. Surprisingly the sources exhibited few of the common signs of Hispanic influence in which Native speakers could now be expected to incorporate not only Spanish nouns as loanwords in Nahuatl but also verbs, particles, and other grammatical elements. All of these innovations remained conspicuously absent from Xochimilco’s Nahuatl records. Xochimilco thus remained a predominantly Nahua place at the end of the colonial period, in terms of demographic orientation, even as it also successfully preserved many aspects of its rich cultural heritage.

The fourth chapter reconstructs the population history of the Nahua community in Xochimilco for the entirety of the colonial period. Having established the timing, rate, and extent of demographic change, the chapter traces the implications of population decline for social relations. The chapter argues that epidemics and subsequent interventions by the government in the tribute system, incomplete and unsuccessful though they were, represented an assertion of royal authority, one that provided opportunities for Nahua nobles and commoners to contest and renegotiate their relationships with each other and with the colonial administration. These changes proved to be especially threatening to the nobility. In response, the dynastic rulers sought to reassert their own political power within the altepetl, although their success owed much to the efforts of noblewomen in securing and harnessing economic assets to their families’ advantage. They also contracted valuable strategic marriage alliances that bolstered, if only temporarily, their families’ positions in the face of so much loss of life.

On Tuesday, March 24, 1579, a Spanish magistrate arrived at the lakeshore. Acting on an order from the viceroy, he set out in a canoe for the small island community of Santa María Magdalena Michcalco, located near the great causeway dividing Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco. The short journey took him from the deeper pool at the dock facilities into a maze of narrow canals. The waterways traversed dozens of rectangular artificial gardens that rose above the lake’s shallow waters. Local, indigenous farmers cultivated these horticultural plots all year round, and if not preparing maize for one of their half dozen annual harvests, they would have been tending to their crops of chiles, squash, tomatoes, and other vegetables. Stretching into the distance with the many gardens were water willows whose root systems, partially visible from the canoe, held together the edges of the aquatic gardens.

As the native-language sources suggest, the history of Xochimilco and the chinampa districts still exhibited a great deal of continuity at the end of the colonial period. The area’s residents were predominantly Nahuas and they retained their demographic superiority by a wide margin over non-Native peoples. The Nahuas still spoke Nahuatl, of course, and they continued to bequeath chinampas, grain bins, and other indigenous items to their heirs in documents set down in their own language. The Nahuas resided in tlaxillacalli, those subunits of the altepetl which, itself, remained intact (as did the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions that relied on it). The Nahuas’ communities were still located in the same, broadly recognizable landscape, one that stretched from the lakes to the sierras. Unlike Lakes Zumpango and Xaltocan to the north of the Basin of Mexico – which had essentially dried up – Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco were still deeply lacustrine environments (devastatingly so, at the frequent times of flooding). Much of the water management program persisted, including the dams and embankments and the hydraulic compartments as well as the ancient causeways of Mexicalzingo and Tlahuac, the latter having been renovated in the late eighteenth century.

Examining the vibrant commercial sector of the economy as well as the busy transportation network that supported it, the third chapter demonstrates how canoes and pack animals enabled artisans and traders to reach local and distant markets. The transportation infrastructure also contributed to the ongoing vitality of exchanges in markets as well as the survival of specialist craft industries and commercial networks that connected Xochimilco to the wider global economy. Crucial to the provisioning of Mexico City, canoes and the dock facilities became key resources in the political economy of central Mexico even as haciendas increasingly replaced Nahua communities as the main source of Mexico City’s food supply by the early eighteenth century. Competition and conflicts developed among different interest groups, among them merchants, colonial officials, ecclesiastics, and Nahua communities, and the rowers of canoes emerged as key figures in the transportation system who could bargain and negotiate from a position of strength.