Office

The Peñón-Texcoco Highway leads to the entrance of the management offices of Lake Texcoco’s Federal Enclosure. A guard stands behind a blue fence. Behind it, a single-story building stands: ample, horizontally spreading through its enormous, empty inner spaces. The Mexican Center for Water and Sanitation Training is, in a certain sense, the heart of the lake’s Federal Enclosure: its administrative heart, its political heart, and the only place legitimately occupied by humans. Inside, a group of people gathers, radically different from other groups that occupy neighboring zones east of this territory: the Lake Texcoco terrains separate the inhabitants of ejido rural properties from the dense, urban tissue of Mexico City. Parted by the 8,000 hectares of a yet uninhabited strip of land, without transportation infrastructure except for a wide freeway stretching all the way to the entrance of the city of Texcoco, the settlers of the land adjoining the lake have not followed the same patterns of growth and disaggregation that characterize municipalities such as Ecatepec or Nezahualcóyotl City (to this day at least). Some of these groups call themselves “pueblos:” many maintain an intimate relationship with their land, most of them being rural communities bond by blood, lineage, or a sense of belonging.  [...]

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