Mexican Indians Bringing Flowers and Fruits to Market, Lake Chalco, 1866

About this piece

Mexican Indians Bringing Flowers and Fruits to Market by the Canal from Lake Chalco, a hand-colored wood engraving from Harper's Weekly for 10 November 1866. The caption is printed in small capitals beneath the image, and the page number 709 and the name of the paper run up the left margin.

A crowd of flat boats poled along a canal fills the picture. In the foreground a man in a blue shirt and wide straw hat stands at the stern of a long boat, poling it forward, while a woman in a white shawl sits among piled melons, grapes and other fruit, and a man in a yellow hat bends over his goods beside her. Behind them more boats are heaped with produce and flowers and crowded with people in broad hats, and tall cypresses line the right bank under a pale sky with a few birds. A bundle of stakes stands in the water at the right edge.

Lake Chalco lay south of Mexico City, and its canals carried the produce of the floating gardens to the capital's markets. The print appeared during the last year of the French intervention in Mexico, when the illustrated papers of New York gave close coverage to the country.