Beyond the lacustrine city, the stinking altepetl

Mexico City has a rough relationship with the water that used to characterize its landscape.
Following colonial hydraulic infrastructure models, since the beginning of the 20th century,
metropolitan authorities decided to expel the excess rainwater, river and sewage flows to prevent
flooding and as a hygienic measure, to different latitudes of its surrounding area. One of them is the
Mezquital Valley in the State of Hidalgo, a former desert where during the 1970's the ejection of
untreated sewage-wastewater intensified, creating a new soil formation capable of growing abundant
crops.1 Today the water expelled by the city use for irrigation has proven to be a great fertilizer and a
source of heated controversy, calling into question the health standards and the bodies affected by
the conditions generated from the materials deposited in this landscape.

Before water pipes turned this place into fertile land, its inhabitants –self-designated as hñähñu, also
known as Otomíes– developed a dietary tradition of scarcity, a diet based on hunt and recollection,
that matched with their semi-nomadic lifestyle and semi-arid landscape. The hñähñu diet is an
ancient endogenous knowledge based on this territory, that today contrasts with the semi-western
food tradition which has Mexican bodies afflicted by diabetes and obesity. The particular hñähñu set
of customs embodies a deep interpretation of biocultural diversity in the Mezquital, that has
achieved multiple adaptations to several interventions that have shaped the environment of this site,
which we take as a departure point to broaden our ways to inhabit and be inhabited. Understanding
its knowledge systems as a reflection of the cognitive experiences that synthesize local interactions
with landscapes and reveal them as an immense source of knowledge.

Human generations produce a pathway of apprenticeship to which anyone can access at any point of
our being.2 The adaptation formats found in biocultural memory, studied by environmental
epigenetic –practiced by medicine and chemistry– a discipline that focuses on understanding changes
in human DNA due to transformations and alteration in the surroundings, deals, among other
things, with the plasticity of our cells to find ways to inhabit optimally in our transgenerational
walk, to benefit from the elements around us. As a community learns to interact and produce
relationships of well-being and kinship with the space of which it is part, our body can learn and
answer to whatever the great holobiont provides.
The most expanded version of epigenetics adds the cultural material manifestations and the
capacity to inherit sensible experience, corporal memory, among other attributes of consciousness
across time. Margaret Löck, physician, and anthropologist Jörg Niewhöner put forward the term
Situated Biologies, for the study of the particular relationships between a body and its landscape.
Some communities have weaved stronger bonds, more entangled with a specific medium, such as the
hñähñu-Otomí.3

We propose to make some notes on the historic decision to use the Mezquital Valley as a
vessel for wastewater –turning it into one of the most extravagant agroecological projects of the
world– as well as distinguishing some of the traits and activities that signal the adaptations of the
bodies to each of these coordinates. Turning desert lands into intense crop fields has stemmed into
the recognition of the ability of its inhabitants to manage abundance and scarcity, from a state of

1 The inauguration of the Emisor Poniente Tunnel in 1975 by President Luis Echeverría was responsible for
this increase in organic matter and water in the Mezquital.
2 "The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are walkers"; the generations
are like "a series of intertwined paths." Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. USA: Duke University Press
(2016), 62.
3 Niewöhner, J., & Lock, M. (2018). Situating local biologies: Anthropological perspectives on
environment/human entanglements. BioSocieties, 13
consciousness more used to change and resource variations. Unlike the history of complacency,
tribute, and abundance that has characterized the Huey altepetl, tip of the pyramid, Mexico City.

Momentum I Journey to the genealogy of a Barren Cloud (intuition of a subtle pestilence)

The word hñähñu, coming from the Oto-Pame linguistic variant characterized by its nasal
phonology, etymologically means "the one who speaks with his nose". This reveals not only the
presence of a linguistic root but also the living manifestation of a cosmogonic system that is based on
a model of olfactory thought, which we will examine in more detail later on. In contrast to the
anosmic metropolitan subject, who is unable to perceive the subtle divine whiff that sustains much of
the magical thinking of these resilient inhabitants of the Mezquital.

The history of the Mezquital Valley is composed of a series of swings and transformations intimately
linked to the cultural forms of each society that has inhabited these latitudes. The first ecological and
cultural crisis of the region was foreseen by Juan Tetón, a presumed Nahua-Otomí indigenous man
whom we take as a reference to examine in depth the effects and transformations of the landscape,
affected by the changes and impositions of ideological regimes. For Juan Tetón 4 tlaciuhqui5 or "seeker
of things”, the Spaniards were the incarnations of certain entities called tzitzimimeh, fearsome
beings, who could appear at the end of 52-year cycles. 6 The year 1588 represents one of these periodic
endings which, for the ancients, were a time for renewal and transformation of society. Within the
concern that characterized Mesoamerican rituality to keep the cycle of days going was the
preservation of the landscape, more specifically, they understood the relationship with plants as a
constituent part of the continuity of the world and its creators. As the Spaniards introduced cattle
and bovines, a decrease in the local population and increasing destruction of productive plots of land
which –coupled with the epidemic– led to a proportionaly inverted relationship: the more people
died, the more cattle appeared and the fewer plants reproduced, changing the landscape completely.
In Juan Teton's vision, this implied a series of negative auguries that foreshadowed the end of the
Fifth Sun7 and its tradition.

Tetón was the last of three tlaciuhquis (along with Andres Mixcoatl and Martín Ocelotl) in arousing
in the inhabitants of the multiple altepetls of the Mezquital and surroundings, a negative attitude
towards feeding on the Spanish cattle, given that this dietary decision made them become –almost
literally– in the livestock itself, and the landscape dominated and inhabited by these creatures. Those
who accepted and united to this peculiar guerrilla were exonerated from the catholic baptism.
Typical indigenous mystical procedure: the method of reversion uses the same element with which
the energetic conversion was done, in this case, water cleaned the catholic baptism. In Nahua Otomí

4 Juan tetón was accused of apostasy, described as an estrangement of all human perspectives (trans-
species, interspecies, non-human knowledge) by Stanislaw Lem. In religion, «the human» meant to
adopt and maintain the belief system of the Bible: how to be related to the world. Therefore, those who
did not believe in God weren't considered human. So, olfactory thinking was developed by intuition and
interaction with the world by the hñähñu, that parallel view, resulted in a standing front to colonialism,
even if this was considered inferior. Today, the anosmic subject (loss or impairment of the sense of smell,
without a relationship with the sense of smell, so far from the hñähñu thinking) is produced by the food
industrial system.
5 Tlaciuhqui (“searcher of things” or “diviner”). This Nahuatl-language term describes a person
endowed with the power to prophesy the future and divine fate. Garagarza García, León. The year people
turned into cattle, in Centering Animals in Latin American History. (Duke: University Press, 2013), note 33.
6 Garagarza García, León. The year people turned into cattle, in Centering Animals in Latin American
History. (Duke: University Press, 2013), 39.
7 Our era, called 4-movement, is destined to conclude with violent tremors: the jaguar Tezcatlipoca will
devour the sun, and the skeletal tzitzimimeh deities will invade the earth to devour people. According to this
cosmology, humans are obliged to punctually fulfill their ritual obligations vis-à-vis the gods through ritual
offerings of blood to delay as long as possible the inevitable fulfillment of this fate. Ibid, 49.
tradition (and all the original people from Mesoamerica) there are specific relationships with the
different kinds of water they related to, as Genaro Martínez tells us:
In terms of the behavior of water towards the good or bad, it is called atolinketl (one who
endears himself). In that context, to ask for wellbeing, it is called atescatl (clearwater,
mirror), meanwhile, the evil is conjured under the term ahuiztla (thorny water). In the
curation rites, its benefic aspect is called xochiatl (flowery water), atzalantli (clear water)
apahtli (medicine water), asesec (freshwater). On the contrary, the spell associated with the
evil forces is called apantli (rotten water), asokiatl (muddy water), and cocoxcatl (sickening
water). 8

Such ability to name and distinguish the different states and gifts of the precious liquid, its energetic
qualities, the places where it could be found and the attributes that gave its different shapes of the
apparition, are another proof of the deep readings of the landscape and its intense relationships with
water. A contemporary expression of this bond between water and mountain –etymological root of
altepetl: alt-agua, tepetl- mountain– is the variety of terms used by the current inhabitants of these
lands, the term ñut’athee, means “that collects/retains incoming water from gullies or runoff, and
mothee that collects/retains water coming only from rainfall, 9 which indicates an integration with
the contemporary landscape, modified and assimilated by current Otomíes.

During the incursion of the Franciscan orders throughout the northern region of Mesoamerica, the
evangelical gospel was instrumentalized as a strategy of displacement of the Chichimecas in the early
years of the "viceroyalty".10 In this period, the hñähñu groups were integrated into the "Novo-
Hispanic" society either as intermediaries between the religious orders and the indigenous cabildos,
or as laborers in the construction of aqueducts, convents, and haciendas, and later through their
customs and traditions with the inclusion of new trades, such as the production of Ixtle products, or
Amate paper. One of these "new trades" was the continuity and adaptation of their agricultural
traditions; although, due to the appropriation of the best farmlands by Spaniards and Criollos, some
hñähñu groups had to develop new agricultural techniques in less favorable conditions, which
enabled them to develop a terminology that reflects a refined understanding of the soil and its
topographical characteristics, concerning the qualities of the substrate for cultivation and its water
retention capacities11.

Teton's battle against the transformation of the particular dietary habits of the Mezquital Valley was
lost, and the customs that shaped up this territory were slowly consumed, chewed, and desertified by
the populations of animals that replaced human communities. Melville points out: "As the waves of
animals flooded over the land they transformed the vegetative cover, and by the end of the 1570's the
vegetation of the region was reduced in height and density. In some places, it had been removed
altogether and only bare soil remained." 12 Less than one century was enough to transform this valley
8 Gómez Martínez, Arturo. El agua en la cosmovisión de los nahuas de Chicontepec. In Agua en la
Cosmovisión de los pueblos indígenas en México. México: Subdirección General de Planeación. (s.d) 112.
9 José María León Villalobos, Verónica Vázquez García, Enrique Ojeda Trejo, Michael K. McCall, Juan
Hernández Hernández and Gaurav Sinha. Mapping from spatial knowledge: bridging Hñahñu (Otomi)
ecological knowledge and geo-information tools. México: Centro de Investigación en Ciencias de Información
Geoespacial, 9-10.
10 In what is usually called the Chichimeca War, a period that started the construction of aqueducts and
Franciscan convents, as well as "a second" conquest, which implied the distribution of the territories of the
Valley for the development of the productive cacicazgo system. This would mark the viceregal period, "the
Hacienda", supported by the evangelization process, which implied the negotiation and displacement of the
human groups that occupied these territories (Nahua, Otomi, and Chichimeca).
11 León Villalobos et al. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine Mapping from spatial meaning:
bridging Hñahñu (Otomi) ecological knowledge and geo-information tools. (2019) 15:49
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13002-019-0329-9
12 Melville, Elinor. A Cattle of sheep, Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. (Cambridge:
University Press, 1997) 53.
into an arid place, where few plants of its native palette were to be found, with hardly any survivors
left, such as the powerful Mezquites, trees capable of developing roots even 16m deep, to find water
and nutrients, who ended up giving its name to this territory. On the other hand, the sturdy cacti
and nopaleras that inhabit here have gone through centuries of mutation and are an example of the
changing character of its dwellers.
For example, the Pachycereus marginauts, a typical plant of the region that is currently
found on the shores of the Endhó dam, is one of the species with anti-tumoral 13 properties, which
prove its great capacity to develop relationships between the interspecies life processes as a resilient
autonomous being. Cactaceae have lived in inhospitable and unfavorable conditions for life thanks
to their phenotypic plasticity. Their photosynthesis process was modified to meet the extreme
demands of water scarcity14, desert conditions, low rainfall, and extremes of temperature. They resort
to the CAM cycle (Crassulacean Acid Metabolism, the typical photosynthetic mechanism of these
species) in which the plant absorbs CO2 at night and fixes it during daylight. 15 The plant has to lose as
little moisture as possible in this process, but at the same time, it has to consume a certain amount of
water to maintain its normal metabolic functioning. The conditions of over-supply of water and
pollutants in a once desert landscape create a new operation in sustaining the autonomous life of the
native plants of the Mezquital Valley.

A similar process happens with the survival of the hñähñu people, their adaptation is sustained in a
system of interrelationships with the world, based on olfactory thinking, a sensorial and cerebral
experience, built through language and the use of symbols, that, associated with the use of tools,
allows subsistence in a hostile world. This cosmogonic system contrasts with western technologic
development, and can be understood as a cultural prosthesis or external brain, a cultural net of extra
somatic mechanisms linked to the brain,16 connected though interceptive processes,17 related to a
simpoietic system, a way of shaping worlds together, in the company of others. 18

This process of adaptation to the environment by the hñähñu people is fundamental in their diet,
which synthesizes a Vernacular Technoscientific19 knowledge, a model that keeps the hñähñu history,
–which is not sustained in worshiping materials (texts or images)– in the bodies themselves that
coexist with the ecosystem. It could be said that these bodies constitute the DNA of this geo-
ecological niche.

It seems important to mention these aspects of the prehispanic culture because of the transformation
that happened with the arrival of the peninsular Europeans: as Alfred Crosby signals out, one of the
facets that made the Spanish conquest in the Americas so successful was the mobility with its

13 Hernádez Martínez, Humberto Carlos, Evaluation of the antitumoral, immunomodulatory, and hepatotoxic
activity of the crude extracts of Pachycereus marginatus (DC.) BRITTON & ROSE in a Murine Model (Consulted
on August 23rd, 2021) in http://eprints.uanl.mx/19917/1/1080314462.pdf
14 Stefano Mancuso, el futuro es vegetal, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2017, Barcelona, España, pg. 186. Translated by
us.
15 Ibid, págs. 186.
16 Bartra, Roger. (2004). La conciencia y el exocerebro. Una hipótesis sobre los sistemas simbólicos de sustitución.
[Consulted in 25th August], Revista de la Universidad, website:
https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/download/059b5143-f4b9-42c3-86b8-6e87869a9f0b?filename=la-conciencia-y-
el-exocerebro-una-hipotesis-sobre-los-sistemas-simbolicos-de-sustitucion
17 Interoceptive is defined as the ability of the body to sense itself, its “interior”.
18 Simpoesis is a simple word that means generate with. Nothing is made itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or
self-organized. This is the radical implication of autopoiesis. Is an appropriate word for the historic systems,
complex, dynamic, receptive, and situated. It's a word to configure worlds in a company. Simpoiesis
encompasses the autopoiesis, unfolding, and understanding in a generative path.
19 Delgado, F. y Rist, E. (2016) Ciencias, diálogo de saberes y transdisciplinariedad. Aportes teórico
metodológicos para la sustentabilidad alimentaria y del desarrollo. Uuniversidad Mayor de San Simón Facultad
de Ciencias Agrícolas Pecuarias y Forestales Agroecología universidad Cochabamba, P. 40-46.
portmanteau biota, a term that gathers the fact that Spaniards traveled with the animals, plants and
the whole bacteriological ecosystem and of reproduction of their natal landscape.

In this context, it is worth questioning the relationship that animals kept with the landscape and the
development of the Novo-Hispanic society. In bioethical terms, what was understood as animals,20
from the colonial construction is instrumentalized as consumer goods?
New Spain butchers, for example, were owners of the cattle, with hunting and breeding
activities over hens, deers, rabbits, hares, geese, ducks, quails, eagles, and fierce beasts; besides the
meat of the Castille animals, birds, cows, pigs, rams and goats. 21 Since then, farming practices have
become the contemporary consuming dynamics, the meat production industries have implemented
“animal models to develop goods for human consumption, transformed in specific products,
essential for an industry which models its own needs, designs, creates and produces particular animals
to answer to specific issues [...] thus becoming an industry that reproduces and consumes itself, in an
autopoietic way".22

The local management and reading of the landscape are the interest of this section of the text, as
well as how the introduction of foreign crops and cattle was experienced. In Mesoamerica identity
was not based on language or ethnicity, rather it depended on the belonging to a city-state, known
as altepetl23; this formation implies a series of specific relationships with the environment, crops,
cycles, and cult, departing from the conditions and gifts of the inhabited place. The political-
territorial structure of the altepetl had nothing to do with what we know today as hñähñu
communities, who occupied what on a current map represents at least three states of the Republic,
that is, they were distributed in a wide radius of influence and mobility, which corresponds to the
semi-nomadic type of life (gatherer-hunter).

The Conquest could not end the cultural tradition of the hñähñu, which was alien to the kind of
territories and social structures the Spaniards had as a reference in their eagerness to extract
economic surplus, as Galinier points out:
"At the time of the Conquest, there was not a single locality of importance in what is now
the State of Mexico that was controlled by the Otomi. There were even phenomena of
cultural involution in the highlands near Azcapotzalco, wherein the 17th century it was
possible to find Otomies feeding on herbs, using very primitive techniques and whose
material organization was very rudimentary. Devoid of centralized political structures, the
Otomi groups were, therefore, able to escape, as Gibson explains with great lucidity, Spanish
influence, which was not the case with their Nahuatl-speaking neighbors." 24
In other words, what was considered precarity and cultural inferiority –even for the Mexicas– was, in
reality, a resistance strategy, which kept the hñähñu activities, rhythms and customs out of the
Spaniard domination and destruction radar. Aridity became a strange destiny linked to the history of
this landscape, scarred culturally and environmentally by a "natural" border: the beginning of the
Mexican desert, whose inhabitants, the Nahuas considered inferior because of their lack of
infrastructure and sedentary life, like the ones that characterized the regions of the Anáhuac basin.

20 Animals belong to the kingdom Animalia and are multicellular organisms, which (unlike plants) have
developed muscles and therefore mobility. This characteristic has allowed them to develop tissues and organ
systems. Humans and animals shared a set of features in morphology and physiology, in this group humans are
included as a recent product of evolution. https://www.britannica.com/animal/animal
21 Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún Franciscano, Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva España, Editorial Porrúa,
México, 2016, 555.
22 Fabiola Leyton. Los animales en la bioética, Tensión en las fronteras del antropocentrismo. Herder, 2019,
Barcelona, España, 27-42.
23 Garagarza García, León. The year people turned into cattle, in Centering Animals in Latin American
History. (Duke: University Press, 2013), note 22.
24 Galinier, Jacques. La mitad del mundo, cuerpo y ritual en el mundo otomí. México: Centro de estudios
mexicanos y centroamericanos, Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
(1990), 61.
Olfactory Cartography of a Reciprocal Landscape

Mexico City is located in an endorheic basin at 2,240 meters above sea level, surrounded by
mountains and high volcanoes from which 48 rivers flow (at least), which in ancient times were
responsible for supplying water to five lakes. At the same time, it is one of the territories in the world
with the highest annual rainfall: 5380 to 6050 million cubic meters, with an average annual rainfall
of 670mm25. This has given rise to a long history of hydraulic interventions and battles in a territory
which is geologically shaped to remain flooded.
We can trace the first construction to connect the Mezquital valley with the metropolitan
water overflow, built-in 1629 by the royal cosmographer of Spain, Enrico Martínez, known as Tajo de
Nochistongo. The landscape in the Mezquital Valley, and thus hñähñu customs, would change
radically with the inauguration of the sewage system in 1900 by the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and again
in the mid-20th26 century with the introduction of the Endhó dam 27 –and its relationship with
Mexico City's sewage and rainwater system–. In 1975, the expansion of the drainage system through
the construction of a mega-duct known as Emisor Central, continued and expanded the sewage
outflows –wastewater, industrial waste, rainwater, piped river flows, among others– from the city.
This led to the transformation of semi-desert lands that had been eroded for more than a century
into productive fields. Thus, new types of crops appeared in the Mezquital Valley that corresponds to
the commercial expectations of the capital, given that its inhabitants consume 80% of the food
grown in the Valley, which is distributed in the city through the historic Central de Abastos.

Currently, the region is mainly irrigated by the Túnel Emisor Oriental, the largest drainage system
in the world (62.4 km long and 150m deep underground), which flows into the municipality of
Atotonilco, Hidalgo. The next change was brought about in 2019, with the first stretch of drainage
from Mexico City culminating at the Atotonilco treatment plant, thus altering the traditional
direct relationship between the capital's organic waste (non treated water) and its joyful reception by
the farmers of the Mezquital. This mega-infrastructural investment by the Mexican government has
led to problems with the agricultural sector because, according to their reading of "agro-ecological"
dynamics, the treatment of wastewater takes away the percentage of nitrogen that allows for the
fixation of other nutrients in the soil. According to Siebe: "Irrigated plots receive "2,400kg of
organic matter, 195 kg of nitrogen, and 81 kg of phosphorus per hectare per year" from wastewater.
Nitrogen use efficiency as a consequence exceeds 85%, making additional fertilizer inputs largely
unnecessary"28. Requiring investment and use of artificial fertilizers.
With the arrival of wastewater from Mexico City and doubts about the salubrity of
vegetables and grasses irrigated with it, its use has remained a source for large livestock industries:
"Dairy conglomerates Nestlé, Santa Clara, and Lala use alfalfa produced in the Mezquital to feed

25 Legorreta, Jorge. El agua y la ciudad de México. México: Universidad Autónoma Mexicana Azcapotzalco (2006), 22.
26 Additionally, in 1905, the president gave indigenous users the right to use aguas negras in the municipal
lands of Tasquillo and Ixmiquilpan and made the right inalienable by an additional decree in 1908 (AHA, AS,
C 109, E 2288, pp. 65-67v). Díaz had first-hand knowledge of the living conditions of the Mezquital Otomí
from his days as commander of the Cuartel General del Oriente in the 1860s, which likely influenced his
decisions to grant the concessions (cf. AGEM, Gobernación, Vol. 67, Exp. 41, pp. 51-2). The fact that the
Mezquital Otomí largely "sat out" the violent phase of the revolution after a century of revolt owes in part to
the Porfirian reforms as well as to the promise of prosperity which wastewater irrigation could bring (Graham,
2013)
27 The Endhó dam is the biggest of five dams created to regulate the increasing amount of water expelled by
the capital. The Endhó dam, however, would prove to be the most important reservoir for the future of
wastewater irrigation in the Mezquital. The Sercretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos (SRH) built the dam between
1947 and 1949 to hold the majority of the aguas negras coming from Mexico City (Anzaldo Lara, 1995, pp. 8).
With a capacity of 144 million m3 and a cordon 45m high, the Endhó is the largest dam in the Mezquital as
well the State of Hidalgo. The Endhó Dam, which today gathers 80% of Mexico City’s wastewater, also holds
the ignoble title of “la cloaca más grande del mundo,” or the world’s biggest sewage reservoir.
28 Ibid, 27
their cows in neighboring regions, while transnational corporations including Pilgrim's Pride
purchase Mezquital's corn for poultry production". 29 The alfalfa used for these purposes is one of the
"forbidden" crops because of the quality of the water with which they are irrigated; the vegetables and
fodder crops do not manage to eliminate the harmful substances from their leaves, part of which is
used to feed the animals mentioned above. This is where one of the most scandalous issues in the
history of the Mezquital appears, alongside the considerations about the formats of growth and
preservation of the multiple landscapes that we inhabit and that inhabit us: the analysis of the
productivity of these soils and their capacity to absorb the nutrients that arrive from the city, as well
as the toxic indexes, generated by drugs, chemicals, heavy metals and other attributes that
accompany the industrial and domestic flow of the waters.

Endhó dam overview. Credits: Manolo Larrosa.

Some argue that the sticky capacity of the clay 30 in the soil of this region –which remained
after the drying up of the lakes that occupied this locality thousands of years ago– allows the
absorption of the heavy metals that accompany the water. On the other hand, it is claimed that the
planting of crops whose vascular systems prevent toxic substances from reaching the fruits we
consume is enough to maintain agricultural fields without the need to filter the water in the
treatment plant.

As an art-based research collective, our interest is to think about the circularity of these dynamics
that are intrinsic to these two basins sharing a metabolism. We, the inhabitants of Mexico City send
our waste, rainwater, and water from other endorheic basins, whose water resources we steal to supply
(precariously) a population of at least 20 million inhabitants:

"After the Cutzamala system began to deliver water to the basin of Mexico in 1991, it united
four drainage areas: the Valley of Mexico, the Mezquital, the Lerma Basin, and the

29 Graham, Jonathan. A Tale of two valleys, An Examination of the Hydrological Union of the Mezquital
Valley and the Basin of Mexico. (Nova Science Publishers, 2015), 26.
30 Another resistance determinate compounding and complicating resistome activity is the presence of heavy
metals in the soils of the Mezquital Valley. For many years, industrial waste containing lead, nickel, cadmium,
mercury, and other biologically toxic heavy metals has been pumped through the clay-rich soils of the valley.
The clay of the Mezquital valley is particularly “sticky” and its platelet structure retains metals for a very long
time. Samuel Gilbert, Soils of the Resistome, Thinking Through Soil: https://thinkingthroughsoil.studio/Soils-
of-the-Resistome (consulted on August 23, 2021)
 Cutzamala System. To put this in perspective: water which would otherwise flow to the
Pacific Ocean is pumped through the Cutzamala into a former endorheic basin 2,400m
above sea level, and then drained- into the Mezquital, where, if the water does not deposit in
aquifers, it continues to the Pánuco and deposits in the Gulf of Mexico." 31

Added to this ridiculous amount of energy and technological investment are the habits of
the capital's citizens, whose consumption and production of waste of all kinds end up in the very soils
on which we feed. For this reason, when we talk about the health of the vegetables that reach the
Central de Abastos, and our possibility of acquiring diseases through them, it is inversely
proportional to the quality of the water we send them, and to our way of inhabiting the landscape
that makes these exchanges possible.
Humans began to modify this region from Prehispanic times, but with the arrival of the
sewage, the “supply of water and nutrients has increased agricultural productivity by more than 5-
fold in this semi-arid region. Overflow irrigation has raised groundwater levels, and excess nitrogen
is mainly leached in the form of nitrate, not only polluting the groundwater but also emitting
nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming" 32 These waters are also carriers
of human artifacts, such as plastics, a unique invention that flourished during the late 20th and early
21st centuries. The Mezquital soil shows an increase of plastic and microplastics debris along with
other anthropogenic smooth, flexible, elastic, durable, colorful, transparent, rigid, heat-resistant
particles that get trapped in this territory creating a techno-fossil environment rather than a
biological one. "Most plastics we now use, at the end of their (often very brief) life cycles, accumulate
in the environment, where they continue to be durable over long timescales." 33
The impact of these human activities affects the geospherical processes of the "Earth Critical
Zones (ZCT), in this zone life-sustaining processes such as photosynthesis, water infiltration, water
and nutrient storage, evapotranspiration, decomposition of organic debris, and nutrient cycling
occur"34, the Mezquital Valley, considered a ZCT, faces difficulties in maintaining its ecological
balance: the presence of technological bodies, such as refineries, textile factories, cement mines,
thermoelectric, sand mines among others that currently occupy and exploit the area and its
resources, replace in morphology and topography the landscape and the rhizospheric ambit in which
roots, microbes, fungi, minerals and other nutritive substances of the soil are affected.

Another plant that has withstood the multiple phases of this territory is the quelites, a word of
Nahuatl origin that simply means "edible herbs". According to CONABIO (Comisión Nacional para
el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad), there are more than 300 species in Mexico, of which
approximately 30 are known and consumed; in hñähñú they are known as Kani. There is an apparent
link between a landscape teeming with stomach diseases 35 and a population whose microbiome is the
most powerful against such presence –if we consider that, “A study by the American Gut Project
found that people who eat more than 30 different plant types each week have the highest gut
microbial diversity. And a diverse microbiome is one of the primary indicators of gastrointestinal
and overall health.”36 In other words, the local diet, very rich in herbs, apart from the

31 Ibid, 25.
32 Christina Siebe, "Human Impact on Geospheric Processes in the Critical Zone Exempli Ed by the Regional
Water Exchange Between the Mexico City Metropolitan Area and the Mezquital Valley", UNAM. (Consulted on
August 23rd, 2021) Humanities Futures, Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University
https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/human-impact-on-geospheric-processes-in-the-critical-zone-exemplified-by-
the-regional-water-exchange-between-the-mexico-city-metropolitan-area-and-the-mezquital-valley/
33 The Technosphere and Its Physical Stratigraphic Record. (2019). In J. Zalasiewicz, C. Waters, M. Williams, & C.
Summerhayes (Eds.), The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current
Debate (pp. 137-155). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
34 Christina Siebe, "Human Impact on Geospheric Processes in the Critical Zone Exemplified by the Regional
Water Exchange Between the Mexico City Metropolitan Area and the Mezquital Valley", UNAM. (Consulted on
August 23rd, 2021).
35 https://thinkingthroughsoil.studio/Epidemiological-Soils
36 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11234
aforementioned quelites, would be the ideal stomach ecosystem to deal with the wastewater that the
city sends to this area. Does this have anything to do with the hñähñú cosmovision, which considers
the putrid as the substance that makes possible the continuity of the world and a food tradition that
relates on these symbolic and energetic levels to its territory and its needs?
Microbial life inhabits our intestines and forms a key part of the metabolic process through
microbiota, nerve cells, and "the microbiota-gut-brain communication axis". 37 The intestine
contains the intestinal epithelium, a system of nutrient filtration and hormonal organization,
which via neuroendocrine cells, very similar to neurons, generates electrochemical and hormonal
responses between the stomach and the brain via the vagus nerve. This is where tryptophan is
produced, an essential amino acid (which cannot be generated artificially), a precursor of serotonin,
which is key to brain modulation, memory, mood, sexual desire, body temperature, brain plasticity
and learning; low levels of serotonin can lead to depression. These metabolisms nourish the blood
and circulatory system, central to our immune response to the environment.
This correlation between the metabolism of soil, plants and humans is interwoven with the
landscape, the rivers and dams as container places, their filtration systems are part of the microbiome
of the capital and the hñäñhu people, connected by food production systems, which now dominate
the landscape and environment, the crops, the cycles and the relationships with the place.

Metabolic traces

To understand the assimilation of these metabolic processes by the Nahua-Otomi groups, it is

necessary to observe a set of pictograms that are constantly repeated in different archaeological
vestiges of both cosmovisions, the sacred circles.
For practically all Nahua groups, the "Chalchihuite", a circle that often has a jade-colored
center, a symbol of the "the divine". We can also find representations of Chalchihuites crossed by
water or blood, which for Nahuas are sacred fluids that allow the continuity of cycles both in nature
and on the divine plane. Thus we can trace in the Chalchihuite a cycle that is traversed by both the
immaculate divinity of water and the divinity of metabolic cycles (and consequently of putrefaction),
i.e. bodily fluids. In Galinier's interpretations, we can trace the hñähñú "counterpart" of this circle, –
found mainly in petroglyphs throughout the Otomi region–, with multiple appearances, related to
the asymmetrical duality of the Otomi cosmos.
In this case, we are interested in a very particular representation in which there is a hollow
circle with a "jagged or serrated" outline. This circle symbolizes the "solar anus", which generates
"from above" the energy for the continuity of the cycles of the cosmos, which is "deposited" on the
soil. The arrival of waste, which for the metropolitans is something despicable, for the hñähñú, on
the other hand, is the source of life. The soil is thus the repository of "putrefied goods", the solar anus,
this dual figure representing the energy of the solar fire "that devours excrement", recomposes the
cosmos through putrefaction.
In the Mexica founding myth, when the gods are gathered to make the sacrifice that will
give life to the fifth sun, the honor is offered to Tecciztecatl, a wealthy deity whose offerings were
unrivaled in beauty. On the other hand, Nanahuatzin, a poor god, whose name means "full of sores",
son of the goddess of rubbish and scarcity, is summoned as well. When the time comes to throw
himself into the fire to be born as the sun of the new age, Tecciztecatl tries four times to throw
himself into the fire without success; instead, Nanahuatzin approaches the immense pyre of fire and
lets himself fall, right into the center. The continuity of the world is not ensured by sophisticated
gifts, but by the resilience of the less adorned body.
We envision the same operation on the horizon of the relationship between the capital and
our neighbors in the Mezquital: resilience does not come from the construction of complex techno-
capitalist systems of abuse and excess over the surrounding regions but in methods of cyclicality that
ensure the nourishment of all the forces that govern the landscape. This research is an introduction

37 González Grandón, Ximena, (8th October, 2020) ¿Cómo nos acercamos a la emergencia de la mente, al
microbioma y a las emociones?, Diplomado de Arte, cultura y neurociencias, ACT, UNAM.
to the intellectual and physical environment of the Mezquital Valley, to reach an understanding of
to what degree and how exactly does a body in action becomes particularized –that is, local– and
how can this process be looked after.