The things we erase last forever; shorn of deliberate remembrance and unfettered by the anticipation of loss, they master the art of being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This is true of the lakes that once surrounded Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Mexicas, on whose ruins Mexico City is built. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, Tenochtitlan and its floating gardens rose dreamlike from the water and barriers of raised earth separated the sweet waters of Lake Chalco and Lake Xochimilco in the south from the saltwater lakes in the north. Canoes moved between the lakes, the inhabitants of the city were attuned to the rainfall and the swelling tides, and the rain god Tlaloc watched over the waters. During their siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Spaniards destroyed the causeways that separated saltwater from sweet and disrupted the delicate balance between people and water that had once sustained the city. The city flooded many times over and the colonial government eventually drained the lakes.[1]
No one alive remembers the coming of the Spaniards, but earthquakes in Mexico City are especially violent and feel like waves under the earth. This is because the soft sediments of the ancient lake-bed slow down earthquake tremors, grow them in amplitude like a tsunami, and the tremors then reverberate back and forth, trapped in the basin of the dried-up lake, echoing the movement of water. For months after the earthquake of September 2017, I would wake up terrified in my Copilco apartment many times at night, convinced the earth was shaking again, and I needed to run out of the building. Above me I would hear my neighbor pacing, unable to sleep herself. Being a historian, I would think of the lake constantly, of these echoes of colonialism beneath the earth, of ships crossing the Atlantic nearly five centuries ago and being the reason why we couldn’t sleep. I thought too of how the city felt foreign and familiar; foreign because each time I spoke Spanish, it was obvious that I didn’t speak Spanish and familiar because I looked like everyone else and the city felt like Pakistan. Bougainvillea tumbled out bright and pink against the sky, vendors sold spiced fruit, and the yellow marigolds that marked the day of the dead in Mexico City were the same we use on the Indian subcontinent for weddings, funerals, and garlands for the gods.
I am interested in how cities, their moods, and their everywhere and nowhere histories register on the body. Like many historians, I have heard voices in the archives and been able to imagine myself in another’s world. Even as that world has animated itself in my imagination, I have been aware of its being unmistakably past. The archive, with its manuscripts, lends itself to this. What we write after visiting an archive is oriented towards change over time. It speaks to our own desire to bring to light what might be lost or forgotten.[2] What is harder to access is the element of the timeless in this formulation of change: To say Mexico City has changed is also to say there is an unchanging essence that we recognize as Mexico City, which is constant despite transformation. We have fewer tools for orienting ourselves towards the unchanging and doing so requires an attunement to space, the body, and uncanny affinities across time and geography. For instance, in the absence of any written record left behind by the indigenous woman who was Cortes’ translator, historian Camilla Townsend writes of how Malintzin, while a slave among the Chontal Maya, would have seen the white egrets that fly over the Gulf of Mexico in the cool season, and how, while giving birth to Cortes’ son, she would have thought in the language of her childhood.”[3] The absence of written texts, in Townsend’s case, forces a return to the land and the body when she imagines Malintzin’s life.
Echoes of a similar trajectory shape historian Manan Ahmed Asif’s work on Sindh; aware that many histories from the Indian subcontinent are displaced from the land that produced them and found in colonial archives instead, Asif takes to walking in the city of Uch while reading Chachnama, a 13th century political tract on Sindh produced in Uch. Instead of seeing ruins, he begins to see a landscape still animated by a sense of the sacred that escapes the linear trajectory of history. [4] Both historians acknowledge the paradox of change: Even lands completely conquered possess an element of something that cannot ever be entirely conquered.[5] The egrets keep returning to the Gulf of Mexico as pilgrims return to Sindh. If we study colonialism and more so if colonialism is part of our personal history (for many historians of South Asia, both are true), it is difficult to separate change from loss.[6] An orientation towards the unchanging, however can dull the edge of what seems like irretrievable loss, challenge what we mean by foreign or familiar, and it can allow for threads of connectivity that we would not find through textual analysis alone.
I moved to Mexico City in August 2017 because after being getting tenure and feeling proficient in my field—Mughal India— I wanted to start from zero. I had ventured west of Mughal India by studying the Ottomans and Safavids, and I had moved forward in time by writing about historical memory in present-day South Asia. I had not, in my intellectual forays, ever crossed the Atlantic, even though I had lived in the U.S. for most of my adult life. I began reading about Spain and the Americas when I designed an undergraduate seminar on historical methods and wanted to include comparative colonial historiography. Unlike any other field, Mexican history left me feeling incompetent, unintelligent, and confused. This was because reading Mexico’s history created affinities with both Mexico’s indigenous populations and its colonizers, and I jumped from one vantage point to the other with no capacity for nuance.
The first affinity: I read about the conquest initially with the sympathy of the post-colonized; I was indignant about the decimation of indigenous people, languages, and ways of life. The Nahuatl lament for Tenochtitlan that my students read in class sounded like laments for Delhi in the wake of the war of 1857, following which the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled from his beloved city, and India put under British colonial rule. Consider, here the lament for Tenochtitlan:
“On the roads lay shattered bones and scattered hair. The houses were unroofed and red [with blood]. Worms crawled on the roads and the walls of the houses were slippery with brains…the water was dyed red with blood; thus we went along, we drank brackish water.”[7]
And here is the poet Ghalib’s lament for Delhi:
“[They]…managed to procure some brackish water. They filled their jars and pots with this salty water since the sweet water was at some distance and it was not possible to travel that far. In such a way they quenched their fire with brackish water. The other name for this fire is thirst. Those who went out for water told us that in the lane beyond which we are not allowed to go, the soldiers had broken into several houses…In these days, we think of ourselves as prisoners.” [8]
The taste of brackish water and pain over a lost city was my first point of entry into the conquest of Mexico. Colonialism, which took place five centuries ago in Mexico, is still part of living memory for many in South Asia. My grandparents grew up in British India and remembered the end of British colonial rule in 1947, when India and Pakistan declared independence. Many of us have grown up with laments for ancestral cities in India that our families had to leave for Pakistan and vice versa and earlier laments for ways of life our grandparents felt were eroded by the presence of a foreign power. In indigenous historians such as Chimalpahin (d. 1660), who sought to record his Nahua ancestors’ histories out of a combination of nostalgia, loss, and urgency, I saw the first generation of men in colonial India who sought to do the same. Deeply Christian himself and a lover of St Augustine’s Confessions, Chimalpahin was committed to writing a history of the Nahua people that was situated in part within Biblical tropes from the Old World. [9] Historians in British India, such as Shibli Naumani (d. 1914) and Jadunath Sarkar (d. 1958) who wrote histories of India using Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian sources to rehabilitate Indian pasts, were committed to rationalist, Enlightenment approaches to history forged in Europe. These were the men my father grew up reading, and I instinctively recognized Chimalpahin, as though we had met before.
My second affinity with Mexico’s pasts was more sinister. If it was loss through which I read the conquest, then I was determined to study what was lost and so I turned eagerly to writings about Mexica culture. Like all newcomers to the field, I found myself recoiling from the act of human sacrifice, the dismembering of bodies, the flaying of skin, and the extraction of a beating heart, all connected to ceremony and sacred time, to eating of the earth and being eaten by it.[10] Years of careful cultural relativism gave way to an instinctive sense of old-world, monotheistic chauvinism: I couldn’t help but share the horror that Christian newcomers from the Old World felt towards the savage customs they encountered. I found echoes of the same horror in the first non-Western history of the New World. This Ottoman text, the Tarikh-i Hind-i Garbi (History of the West Indies) was written in the 1580s and is based in part on Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia General de las Indias y Conquista da Mexico (1552). The anonymous Ottoman writer’s gaze is almost interchangeable with Gómara’s; Mexico is a strange and wonderous place that rises from a lake, and its inhabitants are given to horrific barbarity in the form of human sacrifice and cannibalism. He addresses Sultan Murad III (d. 1595) to say that he hopes in the future that the sword of Islam will reach the New World, fill it “with the lights of the religious ceremonies of Islam,” and divide the treasures there among the soldiers fighting the holy war.[11] While the great Muslim cities of Cordoba and Granada were the basis of comparison for Mexico City in Cortes’ eyes, the loss of these cities to the Spaniards fueled our Ottoman author’s wistful desire that Muslims conquer the New World instead of Christians. An Arab Christian missionary from Baghdad, one Ilyas Hanna al-Mawsuli, writing nearly a century later of his visit to the New World also describes the inhabitants as devil-worshippers and infidels.[12]
While it is easy to see Muslims as the abject, Orientalized other of Europe, texts such as the Tarikh-i Hind-i Garbi show that when it came to the New World, Muslims were not all that different from the people who would come to be their European colonizers. The study of Mexican history served as a mirror that divided me down the middle: I was either furious about colonialism or thought like a colonizer. Interestingly, I learned from a colleague who works on Mexican history that I was not the first South Asian he has encountered whose reactions follow this particular vacillation. He suggested wryly that all of us go sort ourselves out. I responded by moving to Mexico City for three months. I had been invited to present a paper at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and informed my host that I would do so in Spanish; this meant I had to master a working knowledge of the language fairly quickly.
In San Francisco, where I have lived for twelve years, Spanish is the language I associate with immigrants, people who look like me. When I walk through the part of the Mission that hasn’t yet been gentrified, my body is at ease, and the sound of Spanish is the sound of safety. But here, in Mexico City, Spanish sounds like power. It’s the language in which my Spanish teacher informs us that the great democratic advances of Greece and Rome were the basis of Western Civilization. She describes Western classical music as elegant and refined. In contrast, African music is sensual and animalistic. A textbook illustration describes Arabs as turbaned people on camels and someone makes a joke about flying carpets. In another illustration, jazz is described as a form of music that slaves on ships were singing as they came to America. When I try, in my rudimentary Spanish to say something about racism, the teacher coolly corrects my grammar. She will not engage until the sentence I say is perfectly correct, but the angrier I feel, the more likely I am to splutter.
This is a power move I recognize from my own childhood and I’m ashamed to say I have used it myself. To be educated in Pakistan is to be educated in English and correcting someone’s English is the quickest way to put them in their place. I am part of the privileged elite that grew up speaking English and wielded it as needed. In Mexico, I understand how it feels to try to communicate anger in a language one can’t speak, to someone who decides when you speak it well enough to be deemed coherent. I think again of Chimalpahin, of the first generation of indigenous people who began to learn Spanish; translators or young mestizos perhaps, seeking advancement the way my grandfather did in British India, through a language that was a key to a world perceived as brighter and better than one’s own. I wonder if violence lingers in language the way the lake lingers underneath the city; always present and always absent.
Being here is like living under water; meaning is a shiny thing above my head, and I am gasping for air as I swim towards it. I have no authority over the past here, and if I am a historian with a PhD in my other life, here I have the vocabulary of a three-year old. I cannot translate myself and I cannot translate this place even as I’m caught up in the visceral feeling that I know what happened here and I know what Spanish must have felt like to others and there are bits of them in me and bits of me in them. Nahuatl, I learn, has no gendered third-person pronouns, and I imagine what it felt like to think in Nahuatl and speak Spanish, to feel desire that didn’t translate, or to feel forced into a language that made you a child or a liar. There is no third-person gender in Urdu either and the words we use for friend, lover, and companion—dost, yaar, saathi— are often the same. But Spanish is violently bifurcated into male and female, and into precise relations of novio/novia, amigo/amiga, esposo/esposa, (boyfriend/girlfriend, male friend/female friend, male spouse/female spouse). The verb “to be” is split into ser and estar, and explained always with gender: When I say soy mujer, (I am a woman), the verb ser fixes my gender as unchanging essence, but when I say estoy enojada (I am angry), the verb estar signals my anger as a passing state and genders it female. The few times Spanish feels familiar is when I hear Arabic in it—marks of an earlier act of conquest by people who shared my religion—and sometimes I see traces of Islam in the architecture of a city that otherwise has nothing Muslim about it, in which I feel as deeply alienated as I feel at home.
What life-worlds did Spanish erase and what vocabularies crept into it from this land, molding Spanish to Mexico, and shaping Christianity into a religion uniquely Mexican as well? The Spaniards who came to this city saw in it a kind of antiquity, and it was in fact a world that resembled aspects of theirs thousands of years ago, before humans grew accustomed to domesticated animals, the use of metal, and the proliferation of written language.[13] I wonder if for those of us from the Indian subcontinent, Mexico is a glimpse into a future in which the separate and jarring identities of native and foreign, colonizer and colonized that still hurt us will no longer matter. Everything that haunts us about our past—the sense of having been invaded or erased by foreigners—has had centuries to settle into the soil here. And the soil has had the same centuries to talk back, in Nahuatl words that are part of Spanish now, in the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and in earthquakes that make the city reverberate with the memory of water.
What we call our own and recognize as home is part of our soil, as much as it is part of the entangled histories of Europe and the New World. The bougainvillea I associate with my parents’ house in Karachi is named after the French Navy Admiral, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who circumnavigated the earth in the 18th century and brought the flower with him from Brazil to France, from where it came to be cultivated in Britain, and then in British colonies, including India.[14] It blooms in orange and pink on my balcony in Karachi, tended to by my mother, and I see its flowers outside my bedroom window in San Francisco, in a house I chose partly because the bougainvillea reminded me of home. Marigolds, once ceremonial flowers for Tlaloc, the god of rain and water, crossed the Atlantic and made their way to India, where they are now offered as garlands to a different set of gods. [15] The history of these flowers, tangled with colonialism, is everywhere and nowhere, accessible only if you search for it, and irrelevant because they bloom past it all, offering us nothing but beauty and its twinned aspects of transience and transcendence. Without using language, they knit together cities in Latin America and cities in South Asia, and their presence in our everyday lives shapes what we think of when we imagine our mother’s gardens, festivals we attended as children, and what we think of when we think of home.
[1] For one description of the lakes, see Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The memoirs of the conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo written by himself, containing a true and full account of the discovery and conquest of Mexico and New Spain, trans. John Ingram Lockhart (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), 248. For a study of the reconstruction of the city, see Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).
[2] The archives have been theorized extensively. I have been informed by some questions presented by J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “To Go Beyond: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” Archival Sciences 19 (2019), 71-85.
[3] Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 1-2, 140.
[4] Manan Ahmed Asif, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 17-18.
[5] Asif,182-3 and Townsend, 177.
[6] Taymiya R. Zaman, “Cities, Time, and the Backward Glance,” American Historical Review, vol. 123, 3 (2018): 699-705.
[7] Translation from Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford University Press, 2019), 165-6 and John F. Schwaller, “Broken Spears or Broken Bones: Evolution of the Most Famous Line in Nahuatl,” The Americas vol. 66, 2 (2009): 241-254.
[8] Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Dastanbūy: A Diary of the Indian Revolt of 1857, trans. Khwaja Ahmad Faruqi(Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1970),44.
[9] Townsend, Fifth Sun, 251-258.
[10] See for instance, Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2-3, 370-372 and Enrique Florescano, The Myth of Quetzalcoatl (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 182-3.
[11] See Serge Gruzinski, What Time is it There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modern Times (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010) 78, 91-2, 116. See also Baki Tezcan, “The Many Lives of the First Non-Western History of the Americas: From the New Report to the History of the West Indies.” The Journal of Ottoman Studies XL (2012): 1-38
[12] Ilyas Hanna al-Mawsuli, “Kitab Siyasat al-Khoury Ilyas bin al-Qissees Hanna al-Mawsuli (The Book of Travels of the Priest Ilyas, Son of the Cleric Hanna al-Mawsuli)”in In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century, ed. and trans. Nabil Matar (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 45-111.
[13] On antiquity as a point of reference for conquistadors and missionaries, see Thomas James Dandelet, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 113-116.
[14] See Zaheer Baber, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power, and Botanical Knowledge,” Journal of Contemporary Asia vol. 46, 4 (2016) 659-679 and Patrick Bowe, “Lal Bagh: The Botanical Garden of Bangalore and its Kew-Trained Gardeners,” Garden History vol. 40, 2 (2012): 228-236.
[15] See J.G.R. Elferink and J.A. Flores Farfán, “Yauhtli and Cempoalxochitl: The sacred marigolds: Tagetes species in Aztec medicine and religion” (Unpublished paper). https://www.academia.edu/37945160/Yauhtli_and_Cempoalxochitl_The_sacred_marigolds._Tagetes_species_in_Aztec_medicine_and_religion (Accessed January 12, 2020).
Author Posting. © 2013 Wesleyan University. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Wesleyan University for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in History and Theory, 60:3 (2021): 534-540. The article is part of a forum with Manan Ahmed and Camilla Townsend titled “What is a Postcolonized History? Seeing India Through Mexico.” You are welcome to email me if you want me to send you a PDF of the final version.