“Contested Visions”: Ecology and Colonialism in New Spain

Explore & Imagine

The following room will investigate how colonialization of the Valley of Mexico effectively transformed the landscape and rearranged space for maximum extraction. Currently Mexico City suffers from an insufficient supply of clean water to many of its marginalized residents. Understood by many historians and ecologists, this has been directly impacted from the draining of the lakes during the 17th century during Spanish occupation. In an effort, to expand the city and eliminate yearly flooding, major food supplies and water transportation systems, that were vital to the Aztec Empire and its sustainability were removed. This room is inspired by the theories of Rob Nixon and his ideas about “slow violence”. The violence that Nixon describes is created by structural forces that could be experienced over many years, generations and in this case, civilizations. It occurs "gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all," he wrote.
According to Nixon, slow violence can be found embedded within the "slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes" of long-term pollution, climate change or nuclear fallout. But it can also describe many kinds of harm that affect individuals and communities at a pace too slow to assign blame. Like fast violence, people still suffer or even die, but the protagonists of the act are diffuse and often outside the reach of prosecution. Some of the blame might lie with an entire industry subtly polluting an ecosystem legally and collectively, while some blame may lie with a government policy written in a distant capital years before. The point is that slow violence does not always have a clear perpetrator.
"Slow violence provokes us to expand our imaginations of what constitutes harm. It insists we take seriously forms of violence that have, over time, become unmoored from their original causes," says geographer Thom Davies of the University of Nottingham, UK. Slow violence is suggested as Mexico continues to feel the effects of colonization especially in relationship to identity and land.