The Relación universal is a collection of papers, letters, cédulas, and reports that grapple with the problem of and solutions to floods in Mexico City. Don Fernando Cepeda, reporter of the audiencia, and Don Fernando Carrillo, chief notary of the cabildo, compiled it mostly in 1636 at the request of Viceroy Cadereita. Licenciado Juan de Alvarez Serrano, eldest oidor, arranged and organized the materials into their final form and defended the work when it was criticized. Francisco Salbago printed the original edition of five hundred copies at his shop near the plaza mayor of Mexico City.
Although a few documents deal with drainage proposals of the sixteenth century, the bulk of the materials covers the period after 1607 when serious flooding caused Viceroy Luis de Velasco, hijo, to start to drain the lakes. The initial work was designed and supervised by Enrico Martínez who in ten months, with large drafts of Indian labor, cut a ditch and tunnel northward from Lake Zumpango to Nochistongo, a distance of nearly ten miles.
This was the original desagüe and it was the starting point for all later discussions about flood control. These discussions, of course, became more urgent during times of flooding. Thus much of the volume consists of materials drawn up during the administration of Viceroy Cerralvo (1624-1635) when the severest floods in Mexico City’s history occurred. Cadereita ordered the Relación compiled as a working paper for such a discussion after which he directed that the tunnel be converted to an open ditch.
Appended to this edition of the Relación is an attack on it by Don Antonio Urrutia de Vergara, merchant and former client of Cerralvo, which was printed some two months after the Relación. Urrutia claimed that omissions of important papers and biased summaries of others had put the administration of Cerralvo in an unfavorable light. Urrutia’s brief is answered by Alvarez Serrano, but for Urrutia’s rebuttal, prepared hastily to send with the outgoing fleet, one must go to the University of Texas. Also appended is a report prepared by P. Fr. Luis Flores, superintendent of the desagüe since 1637, after he inspected the drainage works in November of that year.
Let us understand that the publication of these materials, until now among the rarest of seventeenth-century imprints, is a major event for students of New Spain. The raw, hastily assembled papers, hunted down in scattered places by Cepeda and Carrillo are nothing less than an inside view of imperial and local polity in the viceregal capital. For all of their digressions, repetitions of arguments, reenactments of inspection tours, squabbles over measurements and routes, for all of the pettiness and cupidity of the actors, these documents tell a fascinating and compelling story. Students interested in political, social, economic, and ecological topics will find the work useful. The analytical index lists the marginal annotations of the original edition. They are set off with spacing and italics and, like the text, are ordered chronologically. The index of names is exceptionally complete and with it one can conveniently use the volume as a work of reference. A map of the basin of Mexico, for example a clear copy of Enrico Martínez’ map of 1608, ought to have been included.
This is the first of a series of volumes to be published by the Secretaría de Obras Públicas to be called Colección de documentos para la historia de las obras públicas en México. We shall await new volumes in the series, anticipating yet another of Mexico’s remarkable publishing ventures of serious scholarly materials.
