Seeing Water in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico City: Henry Wellge’s Perspective Plan of the City and Valley of Mexico, D.F. 1906

Abstract

We examine Henry Wellge’s 1906 chromolithograph,Perspective Plan of the City and Valley of Mexico, D.F., a panoramic view that organizes the capital and its lacustrine environs through close up and distant perspectives. The Plan depicts a landscape integrated by canals, rivers, and lakes, recording a pivotal moment before modern hydraulic infrastructure would remove surface water from view. We thus interrogate this image as a visual register of hydraulic-control ideals in vogue around 1900, as Mexico was politically centralizing resource governance, and reorganizing rural and urban space through the construction of modern waterworks. Wellge’s plan compels us to examine water as a relationship between the material and the represented landscape ó that is, as a combination of social, spatial, and visual practices and politics through which this landscape and geography have been articulated and rendered intelligible.