The chapter traces the rise from the distant pre-contact past of the modified lake environment through the Post-Classic Period when the Native American peoples founded their altepetl, or city-states, until their conquest first by the Aztec Triple Alliance and then by Spaniards. The chapter covers the Spanish--Mexica War and demonstrates that it had vital a hydraulic dimension. While the siege of Tenochtitlan has long been understood as a naval battle, the analysis presented here follows the precedent of the New Conquest History in underscoring the contributions of Nahuas to the outcome of the conflict, particularly when it came to specialist knowledge of the Basin of Mexico’s hydrology and strategic efforts to defeat the enemies by turning the engineering works against them. The chapter concludes by tracing continuities into the mid-sixteenth century, especially with the survival of the altepetl and its foundation for colonial-era jurisdictions, including that of the cabildo, or town council, which Nahuas readily adopted and made their own. In so doing, they preserved control over the water management system even as they adapted to new colonial realities.

This chapter addresses the history of chinampas, agriculture, and the rise of rural estates known as haciendas. It examines the construction, cultivation, and distribution of chinampas as well as the dispersed pattern of landholdings and the complexities of land tenure. The chapter observes the conspicuous absence of Spaniards and other non-Native peoples as the owners of chinampas. The chinampas became a source of contestation within the indigenous community, though, since claims of the communal, usufruct rights to chinampas rubbed up against efforts by the nobility to shore up their holdings through private ownership. In the sixteenth century, demographic decline and the competing demands of the colonial government, anxious about provisioning Mexico City during periods of food insecurity, forced a restructuring of land tenure classifications. At the same time, Spaniards received grants to establish ranches away in the nearby hills where they and Nahuas introduced livestock. As a consequence of all this, a distinctive historical geography came into being, with chinampas and intensive, small-scale horticulture in the lakes, and extensive pastoralism in the upland areas.

The sixth chapter examines how Native communities and haciendas adopted livestock rearing and, in particular, cattle ranching as a new economic activity within the lakes. Responding to the rise of the urban market for meat as well as the demographic decline within Native communities, residents of the chinampa districts expanded into the waters of the lakes in new and destabilizing ways. Alongside the chinampas, many of which survived and retained their value, haciendas and Native communities now fashioned pastures from the swamps. As they pushed further into the lake, pastoralists instituted new environmental management practices and constructed new hydraulic engineering works of their own. At the same time, the colonial administration, responding to renewed fears of flooding in the capital, increasingly intervened in the southern lakes’ hydrology. These new forces for change, when combined with higher rates of rainfall because of renewed climate extremes, undermined both the ecological autonomy and the flood defenses of the Nahua communities, portending of wholesale environmental transformation if not ruination on the eve of Mexico’s Independence.

Chapter 1 traces the common ideological grounds that made possible the formation of an alliance in the early 1920s between Reform-minded students in Peru and a number of Christian missionaries and religious pacifists from Europe and the United States. These students, many of whom formed the APRA movement shortly after, viewed in continental solidarity a remedy to the moral crises they sensed around them. For many Christian pacifists, who like the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves feared belligerent forms of nationalism, the references they saw in the Peruvian student reform movement to the Bolivarian ideal of a united America was inspiring. They viewed in these young Latin American radicals an opportunity for spiritual renewal in the Western World. Whereas these groups of historical actors often disagreed on the means to the end, still they agreed on which end to pursue. For all of them, the Americas provided a foil for the wrongs of Western civilization.

Chapter 4 studies the consequences that state repression in 1932–1933 had on the political capacities and on the calls for Latin American solidarity of the Peruvian APRA. It argues that trans-American solidarity buttressed the rise of APRA as a populist movement from the 1930s on. The simultaneous experiences of persecution and exile in the early 1930s on one side, and of political contests to control the rank-and-file of the party on the other, pressed upon the Aprista community, and more specifically upon the Hayista faction within that community, the necessity to cling to a discourse of Latin American solidarity to ensure political survival in Peru. The chapter shows that being connected to the outside world supplied to the Hayista faction two crucial political advantages as it vied for political control of the movement. For one, the APRA leaders who had experienced exile in the 1920s and who were deported in the early 1930s had access to transnational solidarity networks that others in the party lacked. Also, in addition to providing access to external resources, international connections gave the Hayista faction the opportunity to acquire symbolic capital in Peru.

Chapter 2 studies how personal self-transformations in exile triggered the rise of new social and hemispheric consciousnesses among Apristas who were deported abroad in the 1920s. It traces as a case study the rocky relationship that the young student activist and future APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre maintained during his first years in exile with the foreign allies, specifically the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves, who assisted him, and who tried to politically influence him. Transnational solidarity networks, the chapter shows, would herein assist in crucial ways APRA’s early formation as a persecuted political group. But this reliance on foreign assistance came with a price for the movement’s autonomy: it cracked open a space for progressive US allies and Christian missionaries to peddle their own agenda to Latin American critiques of empire.