Fire and Blood Quotes

“Whatever else they were, the Sonorans were chieftains who laid the bedrock for the modern Mexican nation.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico

“The City of México, situated on a lake that had been gradually drying for a thousand years, had begun to experience serious flooding as early as the administration of the first Velasco. The problem was that the Spanish had deforested the ocote- and cypress-covered slopes of the three central lakes, Xaltocán, Texcoco, and Zumpango; now water cascaded off the mountains and soil erosion began to silt up the lakes. The lakes in Anáhuac had never drained to any sea; and during seasons of unusually heavy rains the water level lapping against the capital rose dangerously. After an inundation in the 1550s, the viceroy had rebuilt the old Mexica dikes; by 1604 no dams or levees could hold off the rising water. The second Velasco set the engineer Enrico Martínez to solving the problem. Martínez dug a tunnel four miles through the encircling mountains to drain off the excess water. Many thousands of local indios were dragooned into this task and driven harshly to complete the job within a year. The task was done in eleven months, at an enormous cost in Amerindian hardship and lives. Unfortunately, while the idea was sound, the construction was shaky. The tunnel tended to cave in, and it was not large enough to handle a serious flood. For some twenty years, huge numbers of indios were kept laboring to clear the tunnel and shore it up; then, in 1629, a simultaneous rise in all the lakes choked the tunnel. The destruction was enormous, and some parts of the city remained flooded for four years. The engineer Martínez was again called upon. Now, he converted his disastrous tunnel into an open ditch about thirteen miles long and about two hundred feet deep. This ditch, called the Tajo de Nochistongo, required ten years to put in operation, and work continued on it for more than a century. The draining of the Valley occupied a whole series of viceroys, used up most of their revenues, and laid terrible burdens on the surviving Anáhuac Indians. Nor was the drainage problem really solved, though the Capital was kept out of the mire. Drainage, and the subsequent sinking and shifting of the porous lake-bottom soil is still a monstrous engineering, architectural, and financial problem for México.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico

“When order and direction created new wealth, wealth would trickle down; Don Porfirio and personal government would wither away; even the stupid and stubborn indios would be caught up in the national momentum.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico

“The American pyramids at Cholula and Teotihuacán were the largest structures in the Western Hemisphere until a greater building was erected at Cape Kennedy to support the landings on the moon.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico

“Mexicans are baffled by people who lack a timeless, tragic view of life.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico

“the knowledge in men's minds had far more meaning for the future than whatever blood coursed in their veins.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico

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― T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire and Blood