Desiccated Mermaids
Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan friar who arrived in New Spain in 1529, was prone to climb mountains and dive into lakes and rivers. Little in his official portrait as an amateur ethnologist and dedicated scholar—the author of the monumental General History of the Things of New Spain (also known as the Florentine Codex)—betrays such penchant for strenuous physical activity and the outdoors. But he did famously hike up Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the snow-capped volcanoes that can easily be seen from Mexico City on a clear day. Once, he hurled himself into Xochimilco in an attempt to retrieve an idol from under the water and replace it with a Catholic stone cross. In book 11 he describes the volcano Xinantecatl, the pre-Hispanic Nahuatl toponym for the Nevado de Toluca, specifically the two lakes that ripple in its elliptical crater some 13,800 feet above sea level, naming the highlands, plains, and slopes; the diversity of waters and the quality and dispositions of the earth; the forests and gardens of his lifelong work:
There is another body of water, where they were also accustomed to sacrifice, which is in the province of Toluca near the village of Calimanyan. It is a high mountain which has two springs on top which flow nowhere. The water is very clear and nothing lives in it because it is very cold. One of these springs is very deep. A great number of offerings appear therein…. This was in the year 1570, or near then.1
Some five hundred years later, the water at this altitude is still very cold and the Sun and Moon Lakes, those mile-wide springs nestled in the crater of the volcano, still attract pilgrims and believers who, due to the low amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, arrive at their shores literally out of breath, altitude sickness piercing their heads. Sheltered by the volcano’s peak and exhausted by their effort, the pilgrims pause. An arid blue sky just barely separates them from outer space. The waters, still clear all these years later, call to them. Something is moving down there, below the otherwise calm surface. Something threatens to jump into their laps.
The presence of mermaids in the traditional iconography and in the many legends that surround the highlands of central Mexico is surprising, if not completely shocking. It’s not natural or logical, after all, to picture these extraordinary beings so far from the sea, especially in a landscape dominated by mountains and forests, plows and furrows. But despite this, you hear of mermaids and mermen everywhere, living happily in the icy waters of the Sun and Moon Lakes, for example, both located in the crater of a volcano.
The age-old way of life in this lacustrine region has been lost forever. But the Nevado de Toluca remains a sacred territory since at least the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Priests, visionaries, pilgrims, and believers would all travel to the two lakes situated at the mountain’s peak, which the locals call the “two eyes of the sea.” Each group of visitors would leave their mark: meaningful offerings of copal or agave leaves, which have been slowly unearthed and investigated by teams of underwater archeologists from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Scepters, many shaped like lightning bolts, also abound in this place. For both the ancient and current inhabitants of the Toluca Valley, the mountain acts like a large “glass of water” that, thanks to lightning and sometimes aided by graniceros, or hail healers, pour their precious waters into the surrounding regions. In rural societies, whose physical and spiritual survival depend primarily on growing corn, this has been a matter of the upmost importance.
For those who live in this area of Mexico, it is easy to believe in the existence of a network of streams and underground rivers that start at the volcano’s peak and eventually connect with distant seas and oceans. In fact, throughout the twentieth century up until the fateful day of June 23, 1950, all aspects of daily life in the valley were influenced by three great lakes: Chignahuapan, Chimaliapan, and Chiconahuapan. The riverside villagers in the municipalities of Ocoyoacac and Tultepec to Almoloya, Atizapán, and Texcalyacac were mostly fishermen or tuleros who lived off trout, frogs, and crayfish, and depended on the lakes for their very survival. But all of that disappeared, all at once, on that fateful day when the waters of the Lerma River were diverted to meet the needs of Mexico City. One stormy night, a group of engineers destroyed the springs in the region, cutting off the water supply to the river. The people remember. When the lakes dried up, when the marshes were turned into a reservoir, the legends of vengeful, threatening mermaids took on greater strength in the region.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the researchers José Antonio Trejo Sánchez and Emilio Gerardo Arriaga conducted a series of interviews with the inhabitants of the Toluca Valley. In the words of one villager, Atanasio Serrano:
In the year 1950, in the month of June, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, the river was lost forever. The people living along the shore said that one night after a downpour with a lot of lightning they heard a sound, as if the land were sucking something up, and they realized that at that moment the engineers were testing the pumps installed in El Cero. The next day the lake turned to mud; the water lilies and tules faded away, and thousands of aquatic species were buried in sludge. The waters that gave life to the famous Lerma River were no more.2
Among all the interviews conducted, one about the Atlanchane or “lake mermaid” stands out. A villager, Cerón Hernández, recounts a conversation he had:
It was an elderly man, some eighty years old, who told me everything.
“Excuse me, is that someone crying in Agua Blanca?” I asked him.
“Yes, son, yes, she is crying. Do you know why? Because they killed the merman, the mermaid’s husband.” “How did they kill him?”
“Yes, look, there was a lot of blood, like a two-meter radius in the water.” “Oh really?”
“And we did not find him.”
“Well then, what happened to him?”
“Well, that señorita pulled him under the surface, because there was a really deep spring over there, I believe as deep as from this corner to San Sebastián; that deep. Well, overnight all the fish just disappeared, señor. There were some left, but very few—and no more mermaids or anything. It was over. What happened to them? God only knows.”
Then came the construction …3
Every time someone in Mexico City turns on their kitchen or bathroom sink, the water levels drop a little more. But perhaps the voices—and warnings—of the mermaids travel in that same torrent of water, telling all those city dwellers that, although desiccated, although apparently gone, they refuse to leave what is left of the lakes.