An original study combining environmental history and ethnohistory, Islands in the Lake is a major contribution to colonial Mexican history. Examining the altepetl (kingdom or city-state) of Xochimilco, an important food-producing area at the southern end of the lake system within the Basin of Mexico, Richard Conway describes the environment, political economy, demography, and social relations of this unique community before and after Spaniards arrived. Because the book examines epidemic disease and environmental change, it also offers an inadvertent cautionary tale. Drawing on in-depth archival research into documents in Nahuatl and Spanish and a vast array of secondary sources, and influenced by recent scholarship on early Mexican environmental history by Barbara Mundy, Vera Candiani, and Bradley Skopyk, Richard Conway's monograph argues that despite the transformations wrought by war, colonialism, and climate change from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, Xochimilco retained its cultural distinctiveness and heritage past the colonial period....
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